A Woman on the Edge of Time (5 page)

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.

HE OFFERS TO
send contact details for other members of the class. When these arrive, I send out emails, attaching my Hannah article, and within minutes I receive a reply from another classmate, Chris Harrison.

‘This is a blast from the past!!!' he writes. ‘I had the pleasure of knowing your mother very well at Frensham. I often wondered what became of her as we lost touch after school. Of course very sorry to hear that she died so young. I will delve into my memory banks and see what I can come up with.'

The email he sends the next morning is very different in tone, though:

I have read, with sadness, your account of Hannah. Unfortunately, this has left me in somewhat of a dilemma. When I knew your mother, I was an innocent and gauche teenager who became unwittingly involved in the relationship between her and the headmaster, which nearly led to my expulsion from Frensham. Before I discuss this with you further, I really need to know to what ends any information I give you will be put as it certainly influenced the path my life took from then on.

He gives me his telephone number, and I call straight away, but his wife tells me he is out, playing golf. Waiting for the hours to pass, I pace the kitchen. When I stop, I notice that my legs are trembling.

When I call again, I try to sound calm, afraid that he might not be willing to talk to me, but he seems to have forgotten his reservations.

He was very fond of Hannah, he says, and for a time they were ‘an item'. It was ‘all very innocent, walking hand in hand to the cricket pavilion, a bit of snogging'. But then, one day, his housemaster came up to him looking very grave. ‘He told me I had to go up in front of K — he wouldn't say what for. I was taken to see K, and he accused me of raping Hannah. He told me he had proof, and things were going to be very difficult for me.'

The proof was a letter Hannah had apparently written to him from the sick bay, describing sexually explicit things. She had asked another girl to deliver it, and the matron had intercepted it. Chris was expelled, but after his parents — and Hannah's parents, too, he thinks — were called in, Hannah admitted she had made up the things in the letter, and his expulsion was rescinded.

I ask if he read the letter, but he never saw it, he says, and if he talked to Hannah about it he can't remember what she said. He can't say whether she had been involved with the headmaster then; he hadn't known about that at the time.

The funny thing, he says, is that the headmaster later made him head boy, but he was never comfortable again at Frensham. He was planning to be a scientist, but he lost interest in his studies and only passed two or three O levels and one A level. He talks about how his life panned out, how he went into business with his father as a commercial artist. But he keeps coming back to the incident with Hannah and the headmaster and the letter, as if he is still trying to work out what exactly it was that happened.

I KEEP COMING
back to the headmaster, too. It is partly like staring at a snake; partly it feels real in a way that other stories I have heard about Hannah don't, is something I am discovering, digging up, for myself.

Though there is something else. In all the years I have lived with the knowledge that my mother killed herself, I have assumed that her death was to do with her impetuosity, something careless in her. My father said once, perhaps on that walk on Hampstead Heath, that my grandmother told him that Hannah developed passions for things and then dropped them abruptly. In my newspaper article, I offered the explanation that ‘all her life she had taken things up and then thrown them aside — horses, acting, my father and, finally, life'.

What I didn't add to the list was my brother and me. What was in her mind when she left me at nursery school that afternoon? Did she turn round for a last look? How do you understand a mother who could do what she did?

But the headmaster provides an alternative narrative. That it was not that Hannah didn't love us, that she wasn't a good mother, that she didn't care, but that she was damaged by the headmaster. That she was not the seducer, but the seduced — not the instrument of her death, but the victim.

I AM A
son possessed. I cycle to Paddington to meet Carole Cutner, another old Frenshamian, who shared a dormitory with Hannah and tells me how she would come back from her ‘extra German coaching' with the headmaster and ‘swoon onto her bed and say, “Gosh I think he's wonderful, how I love that man.” '

I take the train down to Chichester to see Bill Wills, a former carpentry teacher at Frensham, now in his nineties. He remembers Hannah, remembers before I mention it that something went on her between her and the headmaster, and suggests, as Shirley did, that ‘she wasn't the only one'. He remembers the headmaster coming into the common room to tell the staff that the board wanted him to retire, that he wasn't going, though he did.

I speak on the phone with Richard's mother, who doesn't know anything about Hannah, but says that the headmaster must ‘have had a thing for young girls', for he ‘absolutely fell' for his wife. She describes him as both ‘overly friendly' and ‘unknowable'. He would ‘unburden himself to the sixth formers in a not entirely appropriate way, complaining that his life had been a failure'. Coming from a ‘modest background', he had won a place at Cambridge University, but she felt that he had always ‘really wanted to be a public-school man'.

‘The thing about K,' she says, ‘was that nothing ever quite came off with him. He always looked marvellous playing cricket. He had a wonderful late cut, but it was one of those strokes that only succeeded one in fifty times.'

ANOTHER EMAIL ARRIVES
from Chris Harrison, with scans from a school photograph. One is of the headmaster and his wife. She is indeed beautiful, as Susan Downes said, like a 1950s film star. It is a more flattering picture of the headmaster, too: he looks handsome, distinguished, but also crueller — or am I projecting this?

Michael Hutchings also sends scans of photographs from the school magazine. One is of the woodwork room where Hannah stood up and made her pronouncement. Another is from
The Duchess of Malfi
, with Hannah as Julia, kneeling in front of the cardinal, played by a teacher.

In a blonde wig and antique dress, Hannah looks to me ethereally beautiful, as she did in her actress's headshot, but there is something in her face in this photograph, a wistfulness, a distance, that pierces my heart. She is acting, of course.
The Duchess of Malfi
is a tragedy, and I have heard how good she was in this play — but what I see, or feel that I see, awakens the father in me, makes me want to step into the photograph and rescue her.

I HAVE NEVER
read or seen
The Duchess of Malfi
, but I go now to the library to get a copy. The main story is of a duchess who marries beneath her and incurs the fury of her two brothers, but it is the secondary story, of the cardinal and his mistress, that I read more closely. Julia is young, attractive, emotional. The cardinal is powerful and cold. He dresses in the robes of a churchman, but his behaviour is scarcely holy. He has a murky history, is said to have been responsible for a man's death.

The first time we see the two characters, they are arguing. Julia tells the cardinal that he wooed her with tales ‘of a piteous wound i'th'heart', as Richard's mother told me the headmaster inappropriately unburdened himself to his students, and prevailed upon her beyond her strongest thoughts, as Shirley told me the headmaster wrote Hannah letters and followed her up to London. When the cardinal dismisses Julia, she makes an inappropriate play for Bosola, a servant, accusing him of putting love powder in her drink, as Hannah wrote her sexual letter to Chris Harrison.

The play wavers between seeing Julia as admirable, ahead of her time, ‘a great woman of pleasure', and pitiable, confused by her sexual feelings.

It had been performed, Michael writes, in the spring of 1952, when Hannah was fifteen — in the midst, it seems likely, of her involvement with the headmaster. Was she conscious of these parallels? Did she see the play, her part, as a commentary on her own life? Is that what I see on her face?

I AM CONSCIOUS
that what I am doing is not entirely rational, or healthy, but I can't stop myself. Searching again online I find a record of the headmaster's death, from cancer, in his sixties. I look him up in the 1911 census, and learn that his father was a postal sorter, his grandfather a Baptist minister. The family lived in Merton, in south London, and I peer at the satellite image of the street and think about going to see the house, though I never do.

I do cycle into the archives of the Institute of Education to read some letters he wrote to a female friend. They date from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, long before he met Hannah, and I don't expect to find much in them, but it is disturbingly thrilling to open the folder I am brought and touch the actual letters he wrote, to see his blue handwriting sloping neatly across the pages.

In only the second letter, though, sent during his first term at Bedales, he writes that he has ‘fallen completely in love with two or three pupils and especially one really charming Viennese girl of about fifteen'. His correspondent is some kind of love interest, and I understand this was meant to be a joke. But a few letters on, he writes of being banned from inviting students to his rooms because of ‘a rather beautiful girl' who ‘does like to come and talk to me', and how the other teachers are watching his ‘every move' and suspecting him of being a ‘Don Juan'.

This doesn't tell me much more than I have already heard — the ‘beautiful girl' was probably his future wife — but I write it all down, along with other possibly incriminating evidence. His fondness for all things German. A querulousness, an arrogance, that emerges at times (another teacher is ‘an evil sham'); though I have to admit that he can also be charming, endearing. It is hard to read someone's confidences without being drawn into their point of view.

The only possible reference to the lost boy is a complaint that he has been banned from taking boys on holiday. But in a brief autobiographical note accompanying the letters is something else: ‘He took a party of schoolboys ? 1935 or 1936 to Germany & tragic death of the group ? number in snowstorm in ? mountain forest.' The date explains why I could find no mention of this in the Bedales literature, why Richard had heard nothing — it was before the headmaster taught at the school. But what does ‘tragic death of the group ? number' mean? Could there have been more than one lost boy?