A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  I have never properly questioned this word before, have always imagined a precocious fifteen-year-old Hannah seducing a bumbling middle-aged man. I heard from somewhere that he lost his job, and I have always felt faintly sorry for him, as if he was another victim of Hannah’s impetuosity, like the housekeeper in the chicken shed. But now, suddenly, I want to know more.

  When I ask, Shirley’s smiling face sours. ‘K,’ she says, almost spitting out the name. Hannah didn’t seduce him, she says — he seduced her. He wrote her letters, chased her up to London. My father found the letters at some point and showed them to my grandparents, and they took them to the school and he was fired. ‘Apparently,’ she says, ‘he’d done it before.’

  Autumn 1953

  Dear Tash, I am very sorry to hear that you are ill. That must be why you seemed so gloomy on Sunday. I must confess I was very worried about you, you seemed jolly fed up.

  K — he is a darling I’m afraid he must have been rather sad that I hardly saw him. He wanted me to come into his study, but my courage failed me and I made an excuse and ran away. There’s so much I would like to say to him, but I felt shy, and I’m jolly well never writing to him again. When you are well and back in circulation please give him my love and say I’m very sorry that I didn’t really have time to see him for long.

  I’m terribly busy, but its funny how when one is in a crowd of people or rushing around madly one can be very lonely. I miss K and you terribly sometimes. K idealised me so much, but it certainly was comforting to have him believing so utterly in me. There are times when I’d give anything to talk to him.

  We are doing a childrens show to take to four different schools. Well it has been cast and I am a fox, a blind mouse, a sheep, a frog, a dwarf (Grumpy!) and the Gryphon (from Alice.) It really is great fun.

  We had a stupid discussion in Voice Prod, about knowing oneself, and it got frightfully religious, so I stood up and said firmly that I didnt believe in God, there was a shocked silence then some one said well what do you believe in, and I said ‘people’ and personal relationships. And I subjected the form to real undiluted Macmurray, about real emotion analysing one’s feelings and personal relationships. Do you know I believed most of it and everyone was very impressed. Do tell K that I’m carrying the torch and preaching Macmurray among the dissolution of the acting world.

  Everyone says you’re working too hard, honestly Tash one can try too hard and that has an awfully bad effect because your work will get worse instead of better. I should ease up a bit.

  Three

  A WARM JUNE day in Wandsworth, south London. I have come to see Susan Downes, another old Frenshamian suggested by Shirley. I am chaining my bicycle outside her house when the door opens and a woman of about my own age comes out. ‘You must be Jeremy,’ she smiles. ‘I’m Susan’s daughter, Hannah.’

  I am so startled, it is as much as I can do to shake the hand she holds out. Before I can say anything sensible, she has apologised for not being able to stay and is walking away along the pavement.

  By now I am aware that someone else is standing in the open doorway — an older woman, with a mane of white hair. She suggests I bring my bike into the house, and I carry it up the steps. ‘Your daughter’s name,’ I say, as I lean the bike against the wall. ‘It isn’t anything—?’

  ‘Absolutely it is,’ she says, as if nothing could be more normal, as if there are probably dozens of Hannahs named after my mother scattered around London.

  My surprise must show on my face, for she says, ‘I did ask Hannah if it was alright.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘What on earth did I want to do that for? Which is what she would say, wouldn’t she?’

  I want to ask what she means by this, but she is already telling me something else — that we have met before. Susan and Hannah drifted apart after school, but they started seeing each other again in the last years of Hannah’s life, and Susan remembers coming to our house in Highgate when I was two or three.

  AFTER SHE HAS ushered me into the sitting room and come back with drinks, she tells me that she started at Frensham Heights several years before Hannah. Her father had died, and the headmaster then, Paul Roberts, ‘who was a marvellous man’, gave her and her two brothers free places.

  The school was a ‘very liberal establishment’ and took in lots of waifs and strays. Susan was a Quaker, but there were also Jewish refugees, including a boy who had been in Belsen, though Hannah was hardly a waif or stray. She arrived when Susan was about thirteen. Hannah was a couple of years younger, but she ‘had this air of sophistication about her that none of the rest of us had’, and because Shirley knew her, she and Susan ‘adopted’ her.

  I ask her to tell me more about Hannah. She was ‘naturally clever’, she says, and made Susan want to be clever — made her study harder. She ‘could do things, everything she did she did very intensely and had to do well’. But she was also ‘easily bored’. She remembers Hannah coming to stay with her in Dorset, and saying after a couple of days that she’d had enough of the countryside and wanted to go home. ‘With Hannah, everything had to be exciting, heightened.’

  ‘Is that how it was with the headmaster?’

  This question seems to come out by its own volition. I hadn’t meant to bring up the headmaster so soon — I wasn’t sure I was going to bring him up at all — though now that I have done so, I realise he is the reason, or at least a large part of the reason, why I am here. I glance at Susan nervously, but she doesn’t seem to think there is anything wrong with me asking.

  ‘I think she was fascinated by K,’ she says, calling him by his first name, as Shirley had, ‘but it must have been bewildering for her, too.’ She leans forward conspiratorially, smoothes her white hair. ‘You wrote in your article that she was fifteen, but I think she may have been fourteen when it started.’

  Fourteen? Fifteen is nearly sixteen, nearly the age of consent. But fourteen is still a child. Fourteen is the age that Leah, my daughter, turned only a few days ago.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to work it out,’ she says. ‘My last year at Frensham, we went on a skiing holiday in Austria. Hannah had begun to confide in me by then. I remember going to her room in the hotel, and Hannah saying that K had been there, making sexual advances. I must have felt protective towards her, because one afternoon he offered to take her up the mountain, and I said I would go, too. It was already quite late when we started, and by the time we turned round it was getting dark, and Hannah got very upset. I had been skiing before, but it was her first time. She turned green, and started shaking and saying she couldn’t do it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘K talked her down, but it took a long time.’

  I try to make sense of this. The bumbling headmaster of my imagination was not a skier. ‘What was he like?’ I say eventually.

  ‘Tall, with bad teeth. I didn’t think much of him. I found him remote and rather cold.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘In his forties.’

  If anything, I have imagined him as older, but I am still shocked to hear this. Forties is my age — the age of a father of a fourteen-year-old.

  ‘He had this beautiful wife,’ Susan says. ‘We used to do sewing with her in their flat, which was at the end of the corridor from the dormitories. K’s study was outside the flat. That was where Hannah used to meet him. She would walk down the corridor at night to see him.’

  In my mind, I see a figure who might be Hannah, or might be Leah, walking down a long, dark corridor.

  ‘Did she ever about talk about— ?’

  ‘I left the school,’ she says firmly, ‘while it was still going on.’

  ‘How long did it go on?’

  ‘Two years. Maybe one. Certainly a long time.’

 
Two years. I had assumed a few weeks — a month or two at most.

  ‘I don’t know exactly when it ended. All I heard is that something happened — K got the wind up, perhaps he was taking too many risks, and turned cold on her. She went to his study when she hadn’t been asked, and he treated her very cruelly, and she became terribly upset. I think it was why I lost touch with Hannah. I found the whole thing very disturbing.’

  She stops talking, and we sit in silence.

  ‘That was the other shocking thing about K,’ she says after a while. ‘Before Frensham, he taught at Bedales, and while he was there he took a party of school children to the Black Forest and lost a boy.’

  ‘What do you mean, “lost”?’

  ‘I don’t think he was ever found. They were on a camping trip, and he got lost in the forest.’

  ‘How do you lose a boy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice suddenly weary. ‘I don’t think I ever knew the whole story.’

  From my notes, I know that we talked about other things — the Frensham production of The Duchess of Malfi that Sonia had mentioned, in which Susan played the duchess, and Hannah the cardinal’s mistress; the smell of wisteria at the school in the spring; Susan’s own subsequent career as a drama teacher — but I don’t remember any of this. What I remember is my surprise that it is still day when I leave, and the pulsing in my head as I cycle away, as if someone has dropped a stone in the humid air and the ripples are spreading through me.

  At home, I sit at my computer and search online for the headmaster, Frensham Heights, Bedales, lost boy, the Black Forest, but I can find nothing about any lost boy, and the only people with the headmaster’s name have Facebook accounts or are running little league baseball teams.

  In the morning, I cycle in to the British Library and order the few items in the catalogue on Frensham Heights and Bedales. There is a history of Frensham, but it ends with the retirement of Paul Roberts, and there are only two brief mentions of his successor as headmaster.

  There isn’t much about him, either, in the history of Bedales, a sort of big-sister progressive school to Frensham, other than that he taught German there from 1939 to 1949 (when presumably he moved to Frensham Heights).

  In the Bedales Rolls, though, I find something. It is a who’s who of old Bedalians, and while there is no entry for the headmaster (who was a teacher, not a pupil), looking under his name I find one for his wife. I read it twice — she was a prefect, captain of lacrosse, liked dressmaking and gardening — before its significance sinks in: she must have been a schoolgirl, and he one of her teachers, when they met.

  ONE OF MY brother’s friends, I remember, was at Bedales, and in the evening I call him. Richard wouldn’t have started at the school until twenty years after the headmaster left, and all I am hoping is that he might be able to suggest someone I can speak to about him. But when I mention the headmaster’s name, he laughs and says, ‘I knew K.’ The headmaster was a member of the old Bedalian cricket club, and as a boy Richard used to attend the summer cricket week at the school with his parents, who had both been at Bedales themselves.

  Richard is not sure he ever spoke to him, but he remembers him ‘turning up in a vintage Rolls, this tall, rather grand individual in a blazer, starched flannels, and a cravat, who was disapproving if he spotted grass scuffs on your flannels’.

  But why, he says, am I asking about K? I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t expected Richard to turn the question back on me. It is one thing to talk about this with Shirley and Susan, who were Hannah’s friends, who knew about what went on, but another to explain my interest to Richard, who never knew her, who has something unfashionably upright about him.

  I begin to stutter about looking into Hannah’s life, about the headmaster having an influence on her, but listening to my equivocations I grow angry with myself. This is my mother, after all. Why should I be embarrassed to want to know about her, ashamed of what was done to her? So I blurt it all out: about the ‘affair’, the long corridor, Hannah being fourteen, the lost boy.

  There is a silence down the phone, and then a cough. It is the first time Richard has heard of this. He doesn’t know about any incident in the Black Forest, either, and he imagines he would have heard something from his parents.

  I can hear the doubts in his voice. In my family, for all I have held inside me, I have always been thought to speak too much, to be too impetuous. Simon thought this, I know, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had said it to Richard.

  The people I really need to talk to are his parents, Richard says finally. The headmaster taught both of them. He was something of an influence on them — his father even went on to become a German teacher himself.

  He remembers his father telling him, he says dreamily, as if holding onto a vision that my words are threatening, how the headmaster would use a cutthroat razor to shave, how his shoes were always handmade.

  HE PROMISES TO TALK to his parents and get back to me in a few days, but the next morning there is a ring at the door. It is Richard, proffering a large brown envelope. ‘K is the one on the right,’ he says, ‘with his hands in his pockets.’

  When he is gone, I sit down in the kitchen and open the envelope. My heart is thumping, but the photograph I pull out could hardly be more innocent: a school cricket team in front of a thatched pavilion. ‘Bedales 1st XI 1946’, it says on a chalkboard propped up at their feet.

  There are eleven boys in whites, and two masters on either side in umpires’ coats, though it is to the one on the right that my eyes are drawn. He is tall, as Susan said, with a long nose and a thin face. His hair is smoothed back.

  The photograph is grainy, his face small enough to be covered by a five-pence piece, and I bend forward to look more closely. Is that a weak chin? What about those ears — do they stick out? Is that Brylcreem on his hair?

  From Richard’s description, I imagined someone formal, ‘grand’, but when I pull back again I see it is the other teacher who stands in military fashion, with his hands behind his back, while the future headmaster is almost slouching, his hands not only in his pockets but stuffed nonchalantly there.

  What does this say? Like Shirley and Susan, Richard called him by his first name. Does this mean he was friendly, easygoing? Though that isn’t the impression Richard gave me — or Susan.

  I look again, trying to imagine him through Hannah’s eyes, though what I see is a bit-part character out of an old Ealing Studios comedy — a shopkeeper or policeman or schoolteacher.

  THE ONE PERSON I have tried asking about Hannah over the years is Susie, Hannah’s sister. I have always been close to Susie. She is easy to talk to, is a family therapist — her job is to get families to talk about themselves. But as with my father, the minute I mention Hannah, Susie changes, grows silent, nervous. She was seven years younger than her sister, she says, was only four when Hannah left for boarding school, doesn’t remember her well, was taught, too, to forget.

  But since my article came out, Susie has been sending me emails with memories of Hannah. Most are no more than glimpses. The time she and Hannah shared a double bed on a family holiday, and Hannah put a pillow between them and called it the Sword of Damocles. The time they went shopping, and Hannah left the clothes they had bought on a bus.

  In one of her emails from Edinburgh, where she lives, she mentions having met a man who was in Hannah’s class at school. Shirley and Susan were a year ahead of Hannah and couldn’t remember her classmates, so I write to Susie asking her to explain my interest to Michael Hutchings, and a few days later I receive an email from him.

  He only learned about Hannah’s death a few years before, he writes, when he got back in touch with the school and, noticing that her name was missing from the class lists, ‘made enquiries about her’. He wouldn’t have done this for anyone else, he writes, but ‘she was quite the most interesting
person in my year’.

  He doesn’t seem to have liked her as much as he found her interesting. His recollections are mostly about her criticising his hockey skills, or insisting on the class studying John Donne when he had suggested Milton, or how, when he directed a production of Thurber’s 13 Clocks, he didn’t choose her for the role of the princess, despite her ‘being the obvious choice’, because if he had done so ‘it would no doubt have become her show’.

  His most ‘striking’ memory is of her ‘standing up in the art room — when she was fourteen perhaps — and addressing the boys: “All you boys fancy me.” Denial came there none, but I can’t imagine it made her very popular among the girls.’

  I read this over, trying to work out what I think about it. Something has moved on in me in the weeks since I spoke to Sonia: I am no longer disturbed by criticism of Hannah; instead, I am curious.

  Michael suggests in the email that I call him if I have any questions. When I do, he is taken aback that I should think he had ‘negative feelings’ about Hannah — though, as the conversation continues, he admits that his feelings were ‘perhaps mixed’. She was a ‘very strong personality’, he says.

  I ask about the incident in the art room, whether anything might have prompted her to say what she did, but he says that she ‘simply stood up and addressed us’. I ask if he thinks it might have had something to do with the headmaster, whether she could have been acting out what was going on with him, but his impression was that she was simply contemptuous of the boys.

  He does recall another incident in which Hannah described a sexual dream while sitting at the headmaster’s table at lunch, which might have had something to do with her relationship with ‘Mr K’, as he calls him, though he hadn’t known anything about that at the time. His school days were happy, he stresses. Frensham was a happy place.