A Woman on the Edge of Time (17 page)

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 father 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.'

Anne Wicks had told my grandfather that she had found John on her steps. This might be true, he says, but he has no memory of it. He knows that he eventually went home that night. The other John knew about Hannah, so he was able to tell him what had happened, but they never talked about it. I ask why. ‘You carry on with life.'

He has often thought about it, though. ‘In trying to come to terms with it,' he says, ‘I came to believe that she'd embarked on something and it hadn't worked.' He believes the act itself was ‘spur of the moment', but thinks ‘it was in her mind as an abstract idea for some time', and that when her fantasy of making a new life with him was ‘pricked', she ‘went for it'.

‘I think of my own stupidity, carelessness,' he says, shaking his head sadly.

Of Hannah's personality he says, ‘Aut Caesar aut nihil' — either Caesar or nothing.

‘She wanted clarity,' he says. ‘She couldn't live with imperfection, compromise.' Later, typing up my notes, I think about this: how we have all had to live with the compromises she left for us.

His meeting with my grandfather was ‘civilised', he says. He was still in a state of shock, feeling completely negative about himself, but my grandfather gave him ‘a rope to pick myself up a bit' — ‘a picture of someone who was in psychological turmoil'.

He asked for a piece of her jewelry, but my grandfather told him that was ‘impossible'.

I ask about the sleeping pills he told my grandfather that she carried, but he doesn't remember saying that — or about any pills.

He saw my father once more, on an early-morning flight from Venice. ‘I recognised him, he was with his new wife, we exchanged glances — nothing more.'

He has had close women friends since Hannah, though never quite like Hannah, and never anything sexual. He mentions the novelist Angela Carter, and the publisher Carmen Callil, an old friend of my father's.

Did he ever talk to Carmen about Hannah?

This is the first time he has ever spoken of her, he says.

We have both spent much of the conversation in tears, and his cheeks are wet now. ‘She is always there in my mind,' he says. ‘The ghost comes back.'

Thirteen

I DON'T REMEMBER
when I first discovered the copies of
The Captive Wife
on their high shelf in our house, but for a time in my teenage years, when I knew I would not be disturbed, I would climb on to the back of the sofa beneath and pull them out. There was the Pelican paperback, with its cover photograph of a woman and two young children who for some reason weren't my mother, my brother, and me; the delicate Japanese edition, with its rice-paper dust sleeve and columns of hieroglyphics; and the official-looking Routledge & Kegan Paul hardback, with its chalk-blue cover and wad of newspaper cuttings tucked inside.

I never made any attempt to read the book, but I liked to read the acknowledgements at the front: to my grandfather, my father, and our nanny, ‘for her help in sharing the care of my children'. I didn't read the cuttings properly, either, but looking through them for Hannah's name, and the references to ‘an outstanding young talent' or ‘a life tragically cut short', gave me a strangely pleasurable knot in my stomach.

When I was at university, a new edition of
The Captive Wife
was published, with an introduction by the sociologist and novelist Ann Oakley. I didn't know it was being reissued until Susie gave me a copy. It was the first copy of my mother's book I had owned; the first I had held in my hand that I hadn't taken surreptitiously from a high shelf.

I still didn't read it, but I looked at the introduction. I had met Ann Oakley once at Susie's house — she and Susie were friends from university — and Susie had said something then about Ann being fascinated by Hannah, which made me suspicious of her. But I was still shocked to find her revealing in her opening sentence that Hannah had killed herself.

I know now that this was widely known, that some of my own boyhood friends even knew, but at the time I still believed it was a close family secret. I had spoken about it only once myself since my father had told me, blurting it out in an argument with a girlfriend, and afterwards feeling ashamed of myself, and I saw Ann Oakley's act as a betrayal of my family.

I didn't like, either, the familiarity she claimed with Hannah, writing that her life had ‘touched' Hannah's because she was friends with Susie and had followed Hannah to the Bedford sociology department, writing a doctorate, which also became a book, on housework.

I didn't like the way she tried to appropriate Hannah's book, as I saw it, for her own feminist cause: ‘the problematic of women's own needs'.

And I especially didn't like her writing that Hannah's death ‘could hardly have been unrelated to the dilemmas and contradictions of women's situation'. I was twenty-one, still working out what it meant to be a man, and I felt she was insinuating something here about men, about the men in my family, perhaps even about me — though exactly what, I don't think I could have said.

I TOOK THE BOOK
with me on my travels, put it on my shelves in each new place I lived, but I still didn't read it. I didn't read it either when I came back to England and found Hannah's suicide note and the report of her inquest. Even after Simon died, and all those feelings welled up in me, I didn't read it. When I wrote my article about Hannah in the
Guardian
, I still hadn't read it.

It was partly, I think, that I was afraid I wouldn't find it interesting. It was the only significant piece of my mother I had, and I didn't want to ask too many questions of it and find out it was just another old book. Though I was also perhaps wary, even before I read Ann Oakley's introduction, of the accusation I saw myself in the title — the suggestion that this was a book critical of men. I had already been rejected once by my mother. Did I want to read the only piece of her she had left and find myself, as a man, rejected again?

EARLY IN THE SUMMER
after my newspaper article came out, I went round to my old house to claim the copies of her book and the cuttings inside the hardback. I suppose I must have noticed before that there were other books on sociological and connected matters on the shelves, but it was only now that I properly took in that these must have been Hannah's. Standing again on the back of the sofa — a newer sofa, but in the same position — I looked through them.

Most had probably not been opened since Hannah last did so. Inside one, held in place by a rusty paper clip, I found a letter from the books editor of the
Economist
, from 31 May 1965, asking for a review of 500–600 words. In another, I found the handwritten draft of a book review.

Many of the books had Hannah's signature in the front, the writing growing less loopy with age. In the front of one was a different signature, in a spiky hand — J. F. Hayes. I hadn't yet spoken to my stepmother's friend who knew John Hayes, and Susie had told me she thought his name was Haynes, but I knew who this was. I stared at the signature, wondering that the book had moved house with us, had sat here all through my childhood, through the years my father had lived here. I am not sure until that moment that I properly understood that this man, the homosexual lover in my father's story, was a real person.

In some, Hannah had underlined passages or made marks in the margins, as I do when I am reading — as my father, who was a printer, is a bibliophile, would never do. In one, there was even a squiggle where her pen must have run dry and she had pressed the nib into the paper to make the ink flow again.

Each time I came across one of these marked passages, I would read it for clues to her mind. Was there something significant in her interest in puberty rites among the Apache? In the feelings of isolation of prison officers? In the lost comfort and security of Bruno Bettelheim's Viennese youth?

Halfway along a shelf, I came to a book with the same chalk-blue cover as the hardback of her book — Emile Durkheim's classic of 1897
Suicide: a study in sociology
, published in the same Routledge & Kegan Paul series as
The Captive Wife
would be a few years later.

Turning the pages, I saw pen marks, and I sat down on the sofa to read:

No living being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means.

A man of low morality will kill another rather than himself.

Every individual has what we may call a suicide-potential, a tendency to self-murder.

Even if it were proved that the average man never kills himself and that only those do so who show certain anomalies, this would still not justify considering insanity a necessary condition of suicide.

What was Hannah thinking when she read these passages? The edition was published in 1963, and she might have read it any time between then and her death. Was she already having suicidal thoughts when she did so? Or did reading this book help to put the idea into her mind?

Between the final pages of the text, I found something else: the desiccated remains of a tiny flower. It is still there in the book. The sap has long been absorbed by the paper, leaving ghostly brown impressions on either page, making the flower hard to identify. But it looks to me as if it was once a daisy, picked, I guess, from our garden and put here — though by whom, and why, I do not know.

LATER THAT SUMMER
, as my Hannah researches progressed, I finally made myself, or perhaps allowed myself to, read
The Captive Wife
. I was pleasantly surprised by how fluently it was written, with the commas in all the right places. The opening section, a survey of women's position in society and the family since Victorian times, was impressively informative, interesting. But the main part, in which the results of her interviews were laid out, I found harder work.

I read, as Hannah would have, with a pen in my mind, though I didn't find much to mark. I put a line beside a section on teenage brides, and underlined the comments of a ‘company director's wife', as Hannah had been, who had married at eighteen and regretted that she hadn't gone to university. ‘I sometimes feel as if my brain is disintegrating,' Hannah quoted her as saying. Though, beside this, I wrote ‘Hannah?' Her brain hadn't been disintegrating — she had gone to university, got a degree, a doctorate, written this book.

I was even disappointed, for all my worries that it would be anti-man, at how mild it was. The newspapers, with their ‘So lonely in the real Coronation Street' headlines, had focused on its most dramatic findings. But most of the text was taken up with more workmanlike sections on childhood, marriage, housework, friendship, leisure, work. The grist of the book was as much about class as gender, that things were harder for working-class women, who didn't have gardens, couldn't afford childcare, were less qualified to return to work later.

In its conclusion, it didn't even argue for equality with men — only for better childcare facilities, more part-time employment, education that would better prepare women for their ‘multiplicity' of roles.

Most disappointing was how little of Hannah there seemed to be in these pages. The book was a work of academic sociology, containing nothing, it seemed to me, of her own voice, of her own feelings, thoughts, personality.

IT WAS PARTLY,
I can see now, that I knew so little about Hannah and her world, partly the fears and prejudices I still held to, my reluctance to accept that Hannah might have been a captive wife in any way. It is a measure, then, of what I have learned in the intervening years, both about Hannah and her world, and about myself, that when I read the book now I find more of her in it, more of her own conflicts.

When I read it now, for example, I think that it wasn't a coincidence that the average age of her mothers was twenty-six, as she was when she began interviewing them, and that the average number of children they had was two.

When I read now about the ‘relentless boredom of scrubbing floors and ironing shirts', I think about the early months of her marriage when she was learning to be a housewife; how Jeanie told me Hannah always had supper on the table for my father; always used one cloth for wiping surfaces and another for dishes.

When I read that the ‘major psychological turning point' for young women was not marriage but the first child, I think of Hannah's own psyche as a young mother, her trouble bonding with Simon when she had him at twenty-one. When she writes that every one of her interviewees felt ‘compelled to stay at home with their children', whatever ‘their own personal desires', I think of her breezy statement to an
Evening Standard
journalist that she didn't mind ‘Simon thinking he has two mothers', and wonder whether this was what she really felt. Whether the story of the baby with two heads was a truer window into her own thoughts and feelings.

When she writes of Victorian ideas of ‘female inferiority', and how in ‘the work situation' in her own time ‘many of the attitudes to women are based firmly on past ideologies', I think of her experiences in the academic world, her struggle to get the subject of her thesis approved, the delay in the awarding of her doctorate, her rejection by the LSE as a ‘lightweight'.

BUT IF I
can now see that there is more of Hannah in
The Captive Wife
than I had found before, the book is still, as Ann Oakley wrote in the introduction, ‘tantalising in what it does not say, in what it is not able to tell us about its own conception, gestation and birth, and about the regard in which its author held it and herself'.

At twenty-one, I resented Ann's claims of familiarity with Hannah, but now I go to see her in search of her impressions of Hannah and the times they lived in.

She is only a few years younger than Hannah would have been, but she seems ageless, the fire still in her. When she agreed to write the introduction, she tells me, she decided she needed to find out more about Hannah's death, so she went to see my grandparents and my father. They were ‘welcoming, not hostile or difficult', but she felt that she could go only ‘so far and no further' — that even seventeen years after Hannah's death, there were questions they weren't willing to answer.

My grandfather did show her Hannah's suicide note. She was ‘shocked' that he hadn't shown it to my brother or me, and tried to persuade him to do so, though it remained among his papers, where I found it.

In her introduction, she wrote that the timing of
The Captive Wife
, several years before the second wave of the women's movement, made it ‘more remarkable' but also ‘more limited'. It was a ‘wonderful title', she says now, ‘but a more pedestrian study'. She has always wondered how much Hannah was held back by her supervisors, by what they said, or what she worried they might say. She was pushing the boundaries with her choice of subject, and perhaps she felt she had to demonstrate more than the usual academic objectivity.