A Woman on the Edge of Time (2 page)

My grandfather had died, and we decided to move my grandmother, who was suffering from dementia, into sheltered accommodation. Helping my aunt Susie, Hannah's sister, sort through the house in Primrose Hill, I found three items.

The first was a yellowed cutting of the article from the
Camden & St Pancras Chronicle.
From this I learned the facts of Hannah's death, including the date and the place where she died, as well as about her dropping me at the Christmas party.

The second was her suicide note. No one had ever told me that she had left a note, but I understood immediately that this is what it was. It was written in large, untidy letters across both sides of a small white envelope. There were thirty-three words in all — four more than the years of her life. Several were taken up with an apology to Anne Wicks. At the bottom of the first side was written ‘P.T.O.', as if whoever found the note might not think to turn it over. Scrawled diagonally across the back were the words, ‘Please tell the boys I did love them terribly!'

I remember showing the note to Susie, and how she shuddered and turned away. I remember, too, the third item — my grandfather's diary from the last months of Hannah's life. I turned the pages until I came to the day of Hannah's death. But the words I began to read were too graphic, the pain on the page too raw — I didn't know my mother, but I had known and loved my grandfather — and I dropped the diary back into the box where I had found it.

I did, though, take away the newspaper article and the envelope — and some time afterwards I brought up Hannah's death with my father. We were walking on Hampstead Heath — side by side, it strikes me now, as we were in the car. I remember him stiffening beside me, and the dull feeling that settled on me when I realised that he wasn't going to say much more than he had told me at sixteen, though also my relief when the conversation was over, that I could breathe again.

I didn't say anything about the note, but perhaps I mentioned the newspaper article, and what Anne Wicks had said to the inquest about Hannah being depressed, for he told me that Hannah had been to see a psychiatrist before her death. My grandmother had encouraged her to do so, but the ‘eminent psychiatrist' she consulted had ‘told her that there was nothing wrong with her'.

He also spoke with a bitterness that shocked me about Anne Wicks, saying she had influenced Hannah against him, though he didn't explain any further and I didn't ask for more details.

I was thirty years old, had been a journalist for six years, had recently published my first book — an investigation into the mysterious death of a young woman in Africa. There were things I could easily have done to learn more about Hannah. I could have tracked down Anne Wicks and got her side of the story. I could have asked Susie for the boxes of my grandfather's diaries and read them. I could have talked to my brother, who had told me once that he remembered Hannah, could have asked him for his son's-eye view of her, but I didn't — as I didn't show him the article, as I never told him about her note, never shared with him the message she had left for us.

One

IT IS THE
last day of March 2005, and I am driving with my wife and two daughters, aged nine and seven, down to the Sussex coast. We are heading to the barn my father bought when I was about nine myself, shortly after the second of my half sisters was born, as a holiday home for our new family.

As we leave the city, I get that familiar feeling of shedding troubles and responsibilities, that the trees and hills can renew me. Driving through the Downs, I have an urge to stop and follow one of the footpath signs pointing across a field or into a shadowy wood. But we only have three days away — I need to be back in London next week for the publication of my new novel — and the girls are eager to get to the Barn. I left my phone at home, and when we set out I suggested Judy turns hers off, too. Visits to the Barn are a chance to escape the call of the electronic world. For the next three days we will fish for crabs in the tidal pools on the beach, and play charades in front of the fire.

When we arrive, we unpack the car, and while Judy drives off to the village to shop, the girls and I open up the bike shed. We share the Barn with my brother's and my sisters' families, and I am irritated to see that some of the bikes have flat tyres. I find two that will do for Leah and Jemima; they take them off to ride on the tennis court, and I wheel a couple of others out onto the grass to fix them.

The sun is shining, and my annoyance soon ebbs. I am happy to be here — happy that the girls are outside riding bikes, happy to be doing something with my hands rather than my mind. I fetch the bike tools and a bucket of water, and use the tyre levers to free the first tyre from the rim. I find the puncture, but when I open the repair box the glue has hardened. I go inside to find another kit. As I turn to walk back out, I notice a red light blinking on the phone.

It is probably an old message, probably nothing to do with us, but it is hard to ignore, and I walk over and press the button and hear my father's voice — or rather a strangely crumpled, strangely affected, version of his voice.

My first reaction is embarrassment that he should be speaking like this, should be expressing his emotions so unnaturally. Though even as I am thinking this I am taking in what he is saying. ‘The worst news,' are his words. ‘Call me.'

I glance instinctively out into the garden in search of my daughters. The worst news would be something happening to them. I cannot see them, but I can hear their cheerful voices as they ride around the tennis court.

By now, though, I understand that this is serious. The worst news must mean — and though I do not allow myself to finish this thought, a roulette wheel is turning in my head as I dial my father's number.

Normally it would be my father, who is in his mid-seventies, who has had two heart bypasses, I would be worried about, but it can't be him.

Perhaps, I think, it is his brother, who also has heart problems, though before the idea is halfway through my mind I know it is not.

‘Dad?' I say, when he answers the phone.

‘Simon' is the name he utters, that his words fall on. Not my daughters — his son. Not his brother — my brother.

A seizure, I hear him say — Simon has suffered from seizures in the past. Earlier this morning, he says. His body was found in the street near his house.

When I have put down the phone, I stand in the watery air. How long has it been since I came in to look for the glue? A minute? Two?

What I am aware of feeling at this moment is not shock or grief or even disbelief, so much as a lack of interest in what I've heard. I do not want to know this information. What has it got to do with our weekend at the Barn? I want to continue the day as we have planned, for Judy to return with the shopping, for us all to cycle down to the beach. The sun is still shining outside, after all. No one has died down here.

Although I have told my father we will head back to London straight away, I walk out into the garden with the glue. Judy won't be back with the car for a while, and I have a job to do here, a task to finish. I have marked the puncture spot, and I find the hole and rub it down and smooth a circle of glue over it.

I don't remember much about the journey back except that I insist we stop to buy sandwiches, and that everyone gets what they want, even if it means going to two different shops. I remember, too, Judy saying at some point that at least my family knows how to deal with death, and looking at her in surprise.

At my father's house, we learn what happened. Playing football the previous evening, Simon felt what he thought was indigestion, and when the pain was still there in the morning he went out to run it off. An hour later, a policewoman rang on his door. His wife had to stay with the two younger boys, and his oldest son, Rafi, who is fifteen, volunteered to go the hospital to identify his father.

I ask if anyone else has seen the body, and when they say no, I say that I want to go. I am not sure why I am so insistent, but I am almost giddy at the thought. Perhaps I think that as Rafi has seen him, I must, too, that I can take the burden of what he has witnessed from him. Perhaps it is simply that I need to do something, though later it will occur to me that I needed to see Simon for myself — needed the knowledge of seeing his body, the evidence, the truth.

Simon's wife and boys have been at my father's house, but they are back home now, and Judy wants to go to them. On the way she drops me at the hospital. I am familiar with this place — both my girls were born here, I have had my own head stitched up here — but where a nurse now takes me is further back than I have been before, further back than I imagined the building goes, through doors with no entry signs on them, down hallways where patients do not go.

I wait outside while the nurse prepares him. When she calls me in, he is lying on the bed, his arms crossed on his belly. I am surprised to see him in a hospital gown. I had imagined him still wearing his jogging clothes.

‘You can touch him if you want,' the nurse says, lifting one of his hands and letting it flop down again to show me how it is done.

I have seen death before. As a young journalist in Africa I walked through a meadow of bodies — a hundred rebel soldiers cut down by the Ugandan army, young men and women, their skin punctured with bullet holes. But this is different. This is not a nameless body, not a story. This is my brother.

The nurse asks if I want to be alone with him, and I nod and she bustles away. I move forward to the side of the bed. I both can see that he is dead and do not entirely believe it. His skin is waxy, lifeless, but one eye is slightly ajar, and a sliver of blue iris gazes upwards.

I am not used to being so close to him. When we were boys, if I came this near I was likely to be clouted. The story, the explanation, I have heard, that Simon told me once himself, is that Hannah was too young when she had him, that she found it easier to love me when I came along, and this is what lay between us. I am not sure I believe this either, but for as long as I remember, Simon and I have been wary of each other, and though as adults we eventually found a way to be friends of a sort, I have never entirely lost my fear of him, his strength, his anger.

And now I stand over him and look down at his handsome face. His curls have fallen back from his brow, and I see how far his hair has receded, how he must have cultivated these curls to fall over his forehead. And though I am still afraid of him, I pick up his hand the way the nurse showed me.

While my sisters and sister-in-law gather each day to work out the arrangements for the funeral and to comfort each other, I cannot sit still — I am filled with energy, a sense of purpose. Later, I will realise this is adrenalin, crisis arousal, though now I wonder if it is what it is like to be the oldest, as I am now.

My most urgent conviction is that we must lose no time in saving memories of Simon. I come up with the idea of collecting words and phrases that describe him or that we associate with him, and I call family and friends for suggestions, and type them up for the funeral handout. I drive to my daughters' school to borrow a couple of easels so that people can write down more words or memories at the funeral. I send out emails asking for longer contributions to a memory bank.

But when it comes to the funeral itself, while my sisters, my stepmother, and several of Simon's friends make eloquent, moving speeches, and tell funny stories about him, what I say when I stand up to speak is barely coherent, even though I am the writer in the family, the storyteller. It is partly that my feelings about Simon are so confused. But it also comes from the understanding that once a life has been turned into stories it becomes those stories, and I am not ready for that.

In the weeks that follow, my restlessness gives way to other moods and feelings. I try to comfort Simon's boys, to be with them, but it is awkward between us. In time we will become close, but for now I am, I suppose, too much like Simon and not enough — some strange half-ghost of their father.

Now that we are supposed to be resuming our lives, the disbelief comes. As a child, I dreamed that my mother was not really dead, that she would eventually come back, and now, walking along the street, standing in queues, I see Simon ahead of me and have to resist the temptation to call his name. The morning after his death, I turned on my computer and there was an email from him, a message from the grave, and now I see coded messages about him in car number plates, in advertisement hoardings. Everything reminds me of him.

There are episodes of happiness, exhilaration — chemical compensations of the brain, perhaps — though I entertain guilty thoughts, too, which I do not admit to anyone, that I have won, that by outlasting Simon I have emerged the triumphant brother in some competition extending from our childhood.

Though, more and more, what I feel is a tremendous grief, a sorrow that catches me five, ten times a day, and sets me sobbing helplessly.

A couple of weeks after the funeral, the whole family goes to see Simon's middle son, Benji, play in a football cup final. When Benji's side win, when they are presented with the cup, the others cheer and clap, but I cannot look, am turned to the wall, my body heaving, my eyes blind with tears.

I am grateful for this, grateful that, for all my guilty thoughts, my confusion, I am able to mourn Simon, though I am also unnerved by the force of these emotions. I am a natural sceptic, suspicious of what I cannot see to be true, but in the face of so much feeling I am carried into unfamiliar territory. I do not doubt that I am grieving for Simon, for his boys, for all the things I didn't say to him, that I will never now say. But these tides of grief feel so elemental, seem to be welling up from some place so deep inside me, that I come to wonder whether Simon's death has not also dislodged an older grief in me, the way an earthquake might open a crack in the ground and expose something long buried.

It turns out, once the autopsy is conducted, that Simon probably died of a heart attack, that the seizure was a secondary product of a cardiac event. The discomfort he felt playing football was chest pain. I was supposed to have been playing in that evening football game — one of the few things Simon and I did together. But instead I was giving an interview to a journalist about my novel, and afterwards I am haunted by the thought that if I had been at the game I would have suspected that the pain might be his heart, would have insisted he go to hospital.

For a long time, I cannot write. I find it hard even to read. Words seem to me untrustworthy things; all stories to lead to the same end.

As a family, we do not erase Simon from our lives as we did with Hannah. We talk about him to his boys. We put up pictures of him on our walls and a stone for him in Highgate cemetery, engraved with some of the words and phrases we collected for his funeral. We gather each year on the anniversary of his death. The first year, my aunt Susie's husband, the only one among us who knows any prayers, says kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. But he never does this again, and each year we mention Simon less, are less inclined to share memories of him. It is easier not to think, to close one's mind and move on.

At the same time, what was unearthed in me to do with Hannah remains exposed. She has always been present in some corner of my mind; but, since having my daughters, the first girls to be born in the family since her death, I have thought more about her. When Leah was four she looked uncannily like a photograph of Hannah I had found in my grandparents' house, and I put this up in our kitchen and was delighted when people mistook it for Leah. But I still found it hard to talk about Hannah, her death. When, a year or two before, Leah asked how Hannah died, I panicked. I didn't want to lie to her, but neither did I want to burden her with the truth. I put her off for several months, though when I finally told her, she said, ‘Oh, I thought she was murdered,' and walked off to play.