A Woman on the Edge of Time (20 page)

My father was unusual for a businessman. He was a Labour voter and a voracious reader. But his natural affinity was more for Dickens than Saul Bellow, whose novels Susie says Hannah liked; more for Rossetti than the op-artist Vasarely Susie remembers as Hannah's favourite; more for classical music than the Beatles songs Hannah sung while straddling the front of the boat in France; more for Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest than the psychedelic psychiatry of R. D. Laing, who, I know from Tasha, Hannah ‘greatly admired'.

Hannah was no shrinking housewife, but the difference in my parents' ages when they met, and the early years of their marriage, when my father was markedly more advanced in life, had laid down an imbalance of power that was reinforced by his success as a pugnacious entrepreneur (‘One has to be aggressive,' he told the interviewer on the 1963 BBC radio programme. ‘One has to attack.') and his control of the purse strings. One of Hannah's contemporaries at Bedford told me a story about Hannah coming into college with lipstick on and explaining that she was wearing it because she had a tan from skiing. Her husband, she said, did not like her to wear make-up unless she had a tan.

It was the way of the times. ‘The idea that in marriage the wife should submerge herself in her husband still persists,' Hannah wrote in
The Captive Wife
. Another strong woman, Sheila Rowbotham, wrote of her reasons for breaking up with an older man she loved in the 1960s. ‘In some confused sense I intimated that I could not become myself because I was always in [his] shadow ... I could not find an independent track while remaining connected to him.'

But it was a way that Hannah, in
The Captive Wife
, in how she was trying to live, was challenging; a way that she felt could be different with John. ‘There will always be a part of me that you made and which belongs to you,' she wrote in one of her notes to my father in those last weeks. ‘But you need the kind of person I cannot be.' To my grandfather, she was more dramatic. Hannah ‘fighting for her identity as an individual', he recorded in his diary.

IN OCTOBER 1965
, under pressure to see a psychiatrist, Hannah travelled to Sussex University to talk to her GP friend Tony Ryle. Tony wasn't a psychiatrist, but he was a doctor with a growing interest in psychotherapy.

Nearly half a century later, I follow Hannah down to Sussex, where Tony Ryle still lives. His memories of Hannah's visit are still clear in his mind. She came to see him ‘in distress', he says. She had been ‘under a lot of pressure for a long time'. Connecting ‘femininity, intellectual and family life was not easy'. To find the space to get a first-class degree and a PhD, while having two children, running a household, and looking after my father, had ‘taken a lot out of her'. The title of her book ‘wasn't an accident'.

His reading of her affair with John Hayes is that she was seeking ‘the other side of the coin'. My father was a ‘strong, determined older male figure who didn't like being challenged', while John was her own age, ‘more gentle and sensitive'. John's homosexuality was part of the attraction to Hannah. She could ‘introduce him to heterosexual sex, be the dominant partner, in charge of the relationship'. Society at that time ‘preprogrammed women to accept a life structure of powerful men and subservient women, but in the end Hannah rebelled against this'. She was ‘discomforted with herself, and her affair with John Hayes was an attempt to find comfort, to find ease in herself.

JOHN HAYES WAS ULTIMATELY
‘a false solution' for Hannah, Tony Ryle suggests. In affairs, people ‘often go for someone who supplies the parts they don't get from their marriage, rather than the whole person'. But if Tony said this to Hannah in 1965, she doesn't seem to have agreed. ‘I do know that there are very very few men who could be married to a person like me,' she wrote to my father, and John, she appears to have decided, was one of those men.

But as this idea took on more substance in Hannah's mind and she began talking about marriage, living together, John pulled back with equal force, leading to their argument. Exactly how the last acts played out is not entirely clear, though it happened very fast. John suggested the argument might have been on the morning of her death, though the day before seems more likely, for after Hannah's visit that last evening my grandfather wrote of my father having ‘a chance', that ‘there is no other man on the scene'.

If that was what Hannah told her father, John remembers her telling him that she would be at Anne Wick's flat if he changed his mind. Perhaps this is what Sonia meant by Hannah expecting someone to find her, that it was John she was expecting — though once she had turned on the gas taps, he would have had to arrive within a very narrow window of time to find her still alive. More likely she waited for a while, and when John didn't appear, went ahead with her plan.

She was ‘cheerful' the previous evening, my grandfather wrote, and even on her last morning she was in ‘a good mood', according to Jeanie. If this suggests that the idea wasn't yet in her mind, the half bottle of vodka is evidence otherwise, and the good mood could have another explanation.

People who have survived serious suicide attempts sometimes speak of a feeling of relief, even euphoria, once the decision is made. A kind of fugue state settles on them, in which nothing matters but the task in hand. The vodka is ordered, the au pair girl is instructed to collect the son. The evidence of Hannah's note — the small envelope, the sparse message, the wild writing that indicates she was already drunk, or perhaps affected by sleeping pills, when she wrote it — suggests that even saying goodbye was an afterthought. ‘Please tell the boys I did love them terribly!' she wrote, in the past tense, as if the world had already receded, or she had already receded from the world.

HOW HAD IT
come so suddenly to this? Hannah, who was so engaged with the world. Who only a week earlier was planning a new life with John, modern, sexually liberated, equal, uncaptive. The argument with John was the trigger, the sudden bursting of these hopes and plans, but I have come to see that there were other pressures building on her in the last year or two of her life, the last months:

1. HER PARENTS.
Though they loved her, wanted the best for her, my grandfather's diaries suggest that from the moment Hannah told them about her affair, they were overwhelmed by their own fears and anxieties.

‘Where are my hopes?' my grandfather, ever the Grublergeist, wrote. My grandmother was ‘depressed'. They worried about my brother and me: ‘neglect must begin'. They worried about my father: ‘should have done more for Pop'.

Hannah, with her ‘lunatic driving', ‘unrepentant', my grandfather called her at one point, was the cause of all this. They pressed her to give up John Hayes, to try again with my father. ‘Enormously relieved,' my grandfather wrote when she agreed. ‘Not bearable,' when she changed her mind.

They also pressured her to see a psychiatrist, as if her unhappiness in her marriage, her falling in love with another man, her desire to fulfil herself as a woman, were symptoms of mental illness. ‘It could be that I am sick,' Hannah wrote sadly in one of her notes to my father. ‘Tho I do not think so.'

By the time it occurred to my grandfather that the most troubled person was his daughter, that she might have needed support rather than criticism from her parents, it was too late. ‘I should have said to H bring John to see me,' my grandfather lamented in his diary four days after her death. ‘I'm good with young men. Should have helped her. In my blindness, my fear of losing Pop, I did not.'

2. WORK.
The troubles with her doctorate, the LSE, McGregor, had hit her confidence. And it was only not only her confidence. Bedford and the LSE were the only London University colleges with sociology departments. Even if there had been a job at Sussex, or somewhere else outside London, with two young children it would have been difficult for her to move.

For someone normally so organised and reliable, it is revealing that she seems to have abandoned the introduction to sociology she had signed a contract to write. ‘If you can let me have a note of its progress and a likely date of delivery,' her editor wrote to her a few weeks before her death. But when my grandfather went through her work papers later, he found only rough notes for it.

Even the book she had finished,
The Captive Wife
, gave her little cause for optimism. It had been held back by the delay over her thesis, and her desire to see it out by Christmas had been thwarted. Her closest female friend warned her that publishing it would ruin her career. David Page remembers her talking ‘disparagingly' about the book, ‘something to the effect of “They wanted statistics, so I cobbled some together.” ' He suggested this showed she didn't care about ‘professional cachet', but perhaps it showed how low her confidence was.

In the last couple of weeks she did finally secure a job, at the Institute of Education. It was a good position, but not the academic teaching post she wanted, and too late perhaps, her mind already turned against academics. A year after her death, my grandfather wrote of her asking after her dinner with her prospective employees, ‘are BBC people as bitchy as academics?'

3. CHARACTER FLAWS (A).
Hannah's life had not prepared her for failure, rejection, disapprobation, shame. The stories my grandmother told about her successes as a poet, rider, actress, woman were understandably exaggerated, but over the course of her twenty-nine years she had usually got what she wanted, succeeded in most of what she did.

She hadn't inherited the family propensities for gloominess, depression, but she does seem to have been prone to anxiety, panic, sudden ‘fits of despair', as Sonia described them, on the rare occasions when things did go wrong. Sonia remembered ‘floods of tears' if she lost at riding. Susan Downes described Hannah ‘turning green and shaking' on the mountain with the headmaster, and again in a classroom with a teacher. In his diary, my grandfather kept coming back to these moments of ‘uncontrolled emotions', such as a young Hannah ‘standing still and screaming in panic' when cornered in a game of chase with Sonia and Tasha. ‘No way out?' he wrote.

Was this how it was with Hannah in those last hours? Did the pressure my grandparents put on her to stop seeing John, to stop being so egotistical, to see a psychiatrist, take her back to her teenage years, when her escape was to go to boarding school, to marry my father? Where was her way out now?

4. FRIENDS.
For most of her life, when she had her despairs, there was someone there to comfort her. Sonia and Tasha would ‘calm her down'. Susan Downes acted as the ‘big sister type' she needed. My father told me how Hannah would get suddenly upset about something, and he would put his ‘arm around her sympathetically and crack a joke, and it would flare down'.

But my father wasn't around in those last weeks and days — she had kicked him out of the house. And where were the close female friends she had relied on in the past? She had started seeing Susan again, but as a couple, without the old closeness, and she saw little in her last years of Shirley, Sonia, even Tasha.

It was partly that they all had their own busy lives. But it was also that Hannah's rush to grow up had pushed her in advance of her old friends. ‘Why do I never see or hear from you?' she wrote to Tasha, who was still at school when Hannah got engaged to my father. ‘Is it because Pop is a businessman?'

It was partly, too, that her ambitions, her efforts to be a new kind of woman, had isolated her from other women, as it had with the exceptional women in Rachel Cooke's book about the 1950s. Phyll Willmott, a newer friend, but warm, intelligent, living close by, might have been someone who could have provided support and perspective. Phyll even picked up that Hannah ‘was having a bad time in some way' and ‘wondered if she might talk about it', but when she didn't, Phyll didn't encourage her. After Hannah's death, she wrote of her guilt that she didn't realise that Hannah was in trouble, didn't help her, ‘and more guilt because of my always slightly ambivalent feelings towards her'.

It was also, perhaps, her pride, as Gunilla Lavelle said, a reluctance to admit she was in trouble. Hannah was the one advising Tasha with her boyfriend problems, helping Erica with her abortion, climbing through Katrin Stroh's window. She ‘always seemed so much in command of every situation it never occurred to us she had problems of her own', Sonia wrote after her death.

The one female friend she did confide in, who knew about John, who allowed her to meet him in her flat, was Anne Wicks. But Anne was another clever, strong, ambitious woman, not the arm-around-the shoulder type. When Hannah told her she would kill herself if John Hayes rejected her, Anne didn't take it seriously. Instead she told Hannah that her book wasn't rigorous enough, that publishing it would ruin her reputation.

5. CHARACTER FLAWS (B).
One of the old family friends who I discover goes back to Hannah's time is the playwright Arnold Wesker. ‘Her death affected me very deeply,' he writes after I leave a message. ‘Not because we knew her intimately but because she was sweet, kind, and beautiful, and her death was so unexpected — she was so young. It affected me so much that I recreated her in one of my stories, “Six Sundays in January”. I can't put my hand on my heart and say Katerina Levinson is a head-on portrait of your mother, but something of her atmosphere touches the story. It might give you a hint of her.'