A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  ‘There are no easy answers to the question of how you live in a world you want to change radically,’ Sheila Rowbotham wrote. If Hannah had been a few years younger, writing a few years later, she would have come across women like Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Germaine Greer. In the last months of the 1960s, the first women’s groups began to appear, offering support to women trying to change things in the world, in their own lives. But those few years earlier, Hannah in her work, and in a life informed by that work, was very much alone.

  Whether because she was mad in those last days, or the world was mad, she put everything into her relationship with John Hayes, into the brave new life she imagined with him, because she had to — because, once she had seen a different way of being, she could not accept living by the old ways. ‘We were like pioneers who’d left the Old Country,’ another early feminist told Susan Faludi. ‘And we had nowhere to go back to.’ ‘When it didn’t work out with John Hayes,’ Tony Ryle told me, ‘she couldn’t go back and she couldn’t go forward.’

  I grew up with the idea of there being two Hannahs: the Hannah who wanted everything out of life, and the Hannah who wanted nothing. Perhaps this was because her ‘unlivable situation’ split her ‘in two’. Or perhaps there is another way to think about it. That she died not despite the life force, the character, that her friends remember, that won her showjumping cups, led her to marry at eighteen, to write The Captive Wife, but because of it.

  This be one more fact

  BUT OF COURSE no narrative, no narrative verdict, is ever really complete. In one last conversation about Hannah, my father mentions that he thinks she had another affair before the one with John Hayes. He has told me this before, I realise, but I hadn’t really taken it in — perhaps because I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, perhaps because I wasn’t ready to hear it myself.

  ‘With who?’ I say now, thinking he will take it back, or tell me he doesn’t know, doesn’t remember.

  ‘A doctor.’

  ‘What doctor?’

  ‘You don’t know him.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  He purses his lips. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I’m interested.’

  ‘John Paulett,’ he says, eventually.

  He and Hannah met John Paulett and his wife on a beach in the south of France, he says. The Pauletts lived in Bexleyheath. Hannah was ‘always keen to visit them there’.

  ‘How do you know they were having an affair?’

  ‘I don’t,’ he says. ‘But I suspected.’

  ‘What made you suspect?’

  ‘I was sitting on the sofa with the wife, and she tried to make up to me, and when I protested, she asked me what I thought the others were doing in the next room.’

  He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. He was naive, he thought the wife was just a bit strange, but afterwards —

  His voice trails off; he has said more than he intended.

  ‘When was this?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, quite a lot earlier.’

  ‘How much earlier?’

  ‘The late Fifties.’

  ‘But that was before I was born,’ I protest.

  ‘Yes,’ he says firmly. ‘Between Simon and you.’

  JOHN PAULETT, I discover online, was born in 1918 — he was twelve years older than my father, eighteen older than Hannah — and died in 1997. He had three wives and two children. One of the children is called Daphne, and I find a Daphne Paulett in Greece. She has an email address, and I send her a brief email saying that I think her father might have known my mother.

  ‘Yes, John Paulett was my dad,’ she replies, ‘and I do remember your mother. Please ask me what you want to know.’

  I write back a careful email, suggesting only that her father may have had some influence on Hannah. I don’t want to be the one to tell her about her father and my mother, or to claim something that is not true.

  But she writes back, ‘I am pretty sure that my dad had an affair with Hannah.’

  They lived in St Paul’s Cray, not Bexleyheath, she says. She remembers my parents visiting: ‘a couple who used to live in London who would bring us strange things from the city, like avocado pears’. This sounds right — my uncle used to send boxes of avocados from Israel.

  In further emails, she tells me a little more. Her father was ‘a strong influence on everybody that knew him’. Her mother also killed herself, in 1963, when Daphne was twelve — after ‘a very huge fight with my dad’. Daphne found her.

  Her father wrote a book called Neurosis. He had lots of affairs. Her mother’s death was several years after his affair with Hannah, she assures me — was nothing to do with that.

  She sends me a photograph of him: a good-looking man in a white shirt, collar turned up, sleeves rolled, standing in his garden holding up a fox he had killed, she writes, because it invaded his chicken run. Three dead chickens also lie at his feet.

  I AM STUNNED by all this. I thought I had understood Hannah, had made sense of her life and death — and now this changes everything. John Paulett wasn’t the ‘other side of the coin’, as Tony Ryle had said of John Hayes, but another powerful older man.

  I spend more time at the computer, and learn that he was a political radical, one of the original Committee of a Hundred, the anti-war group set up to demonstrate against nuclear weapons in 1960, along with Ralph Miliband, Arnold Wesker, Lindsay Anderson, John Osborne, and others.

  How do I reconcile this with my theories about Hannah’s need to be young again, to free herself from male domination, that it was at Hornsey that she was radicalised?

  BETWEEN SIMON AND ME, my father insisted. Before I was born. My God, I think for a minute, John Paulett could be my father — before reason returns to me. I only have to look in the mirror to know who my father is.

  My father, who is not usually good on dates, was surprisingly sure about when this affair happened. What could have fixed the time in his mind? I think of his spine operation — how he was on his back in hospital for six weeks in 1959. He made a point of telling me how good Hannah was to him then, how she was at his bedside every day — but perhaps she was being so nice to make up for what she was doing when she wasn’t there.

  I remember also about Hannah’s miscarriage between Simon and me. I am not John Paulett’s son — but could the miscarried baby have been? Was this what Hannah’s story of the two-headed baby was about? A baby with two heads because it had two fathers — because she didn’t know which one was the father?

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in my life, I am angry with Hannah. I think of David Page’s description of her fancying male students. I have loved this image ever since I got the letter — this ballsy, Mae West-ish Hannah. But now there is something disturbing about it. Who else was she sleeping with?

  There is something sickening, too, about the thought that she was having an affair before I was born. Why bring a child into an already fractured family?

  THOUGH, AS TIME PASSES, my anger fades. It is hard to be angry with someone for giving me life. It is hard to be angry with someone whose own life was so foreshortened — who missed out on so much.

  She would be in her seventies now, if she had lived — a grey-haired grandmother of five. In all the years since, I have only ever had one dream in which she appeared. It was shortly after I had come back to London from my years abroad. I was her last age, though in my dream she was middle-aged, motherly, even a little plump.

  I don’t remember her saying anything, only sitting at the end of my bed, as if I had woken from sleep to find her there. I remember how happy I felt in my dream — and that the happiness stayed with me for days.

  I SET OUT on these inquiries as a son looking for a mother — but the Hannah I have found is not that motherly, middle-aged woman, or the woman in her seventies she would be now
. She is the Hannah of her childhood, her teens, her twenties. The Hannah who will never grow older than twenty-nine. I am fifty-two as I write the final version of these last words, the years between us almost the same as they were when I was born, though I am now the older, old enough to be her father.

  I have done what I can to give Hannah life again, in my head, on these pages, as a father gives life to a daughter. Now, as a father must eventually let go of his daughters, as I have already begun to do with my own daughters as they grow towards adulthood, I must let my mother go.

  Acknowledgements

  The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him.

  William Maxwell

  This is not my book alone. It could not have been written without the contributions of my father, my aunt, my stepmother, and other members of my family, and of Hannah’s friends and colleagues, who so generously dug up old memories, photographs, diaries, letters. Some are mentioned in these pages; others, not. I owe a great debt of gratitude to all of them.

  Carmen Callil and Joan Aleshire read earlier drafts and gave invaluable advice. Clare Alexander, wise and never wavering, did the same and much more. Philip Gwyn Jones, Molly Slight, Sarah Braybrooke, and Henry Rosenbloom guided me on the final steps.

  Henry Singer gave friendship.

  Rafi Gavron responded from the heart.

  Leah and Mima Gavron grew up with this book and never complained, always understood. Leah helped me see the ending.

  Judy Henry helped me see. In you I do.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  These be the facts

  Spring 1952

  One

  Summer — autumn 1953

  Two

  Autumn 1953

  Three

  Autumn 1953

  Four

  Winter 1953

  Five

  Winter – Spring 1954

  Six

  Spring 1954

  Seven

  Date unknown

  Eight

  January 1965

  Nine

  From Six Days in January , by Arnold Wesker, 1966–67

  Ten

  From What Are You Doing To Me , T. R. Fyvel, 1950s

  Eleven

  Spring 1954 – Autumn 1956

  Twelve

  From The Captive Wife , 1966

  Thirteen

  Autumn 1965

  Fourteen

  This be one more fact

  Acknowledgements