A Woman on the Edge of Time Read online

  Spring 1952

  Cher Tash, I am sick of French I already almost dream in it, but to be quite honest I dont think I will improve much, if people talk slowly I understand pretty well but you would be surprised how silent I am I hardly say anything.

  This isnt a school at all, and there are no other children here but me. At first I was terribly lonely at the thought of spending three weeks without company of my own age, but now I don’t mind nearly so much, but I certainly miss male company, do you know I haven’t spoken to a young boy for over two weeks, and the French boys are so attractive — its most frustrating!

  Monsieur is a funny old chap — he reminds me of a walrus — he has a large moustache which he combs with a little pink comb! he cracks jokes all the time — feeble ones at that, half of which I dont understand, but I just laugh when he stops and thats ok.

  I have the most wonderful view from my window, out across the Seine, over the Bois de Boulogne straight to the Eiffel Tower, and a little to the left is the Arc de Triomphe. The Bois de Boulogne is beautiful. If I ever get married I shall cart my fiancee here and make him walk through it with me.

  Coming over on the plane I had an affair with a man of about 30, who is the personal assistant to Lord Beaverbrook, and works on the Express. He bought me some brandy, and a cup of coffee, and invited me to go to St Tropez with him — I was very tempted. He gave me his card and said that he was always in Paris and I was to ring him at the offices of the Express and he would take me out for dinner! You know I rather think I will!

  Madame raised her eyebrows when I told her that I went to a mixed boarding school, they consider me a little innocent nevertheless! — little do they know!!!!

  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.

  Now, though I don’t talk to my family, I find myself blurting out about her suicide to people I hardly know, cornering strangers like the ancient mariner, or Conrad’s Marlow, with my inconclusive story.

  I am almost exactly the age Simon was when he died, playing in the same weekly football game, when I have a cardiac event of my own. Like Simon, I begin to feel unwell during the game. I have a slight ear infection, and I tell myself it is my ear, that I will go to the doctor tomorrow to get antibiotics, and I continue playing. But when the game ends I am still conscious of a pressure on my chest, and I take myself to the hospital. It is a heart attack, but caught early, and fortunately a small one. The cardiologist threads three stents into my arteries, and within a few weeks I am back to running and playing football.

  The symmetry of what has happened is not lost on me. I have survived in part because of what happened to Simon. If it wasn’t for his death I probably wouldn’t have gone to the hospital. I might have woken the next morning, gone for a walk or a run as he did, and ended up in a different part of the building.

  It is common after a heart attack to be depressed, but I feel invigorated, re-engaged with life. We throw a party. I delight in telling people what has happened, how I have beaten the family curse, have not died young.

  Within a few months, I complete my first proper piece of writing since Simon died, and I begin working on a new novel, an idea about an unexplained death I have had in my mind for a long time, though now I see it from the point of view of a journalist investigatin
g the case. But while I know how the story should feel — part fairy tale, part detective story, magical and ordinary at the same time — I cannot get this feeling to come to life on the page, as if there is still a disconnect between my emotions and my intellect, my heart and my head.

  Six months after my heart attack, leafing through a newspaper, I come upon an article about the recent suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. I have long known that there were similarities between Plath’s death and my mother’s, but what I read now sends a chill of recognition through me. It is not only the proximity of the two flats, the ages of the two women, the gas ovens. Nicholas Hughes was forty-seven, as I am. Like my father, Ted Hughes apparently tried to keep the truth from his children until they were older. Like me, the article suggests, Nicholas Hughes was deeply affected by a second death — in his case, that of his father.

  By the time I have finished reading, I know I am going to write something about Hannah. I call the Guardian and all but insist that the editor I speak to commissions the piece, which I write in a state of nervous exhilaration, the words flowing from me, and I file straight away, so that I cannot change my mind.

  Summer — autumn 1953

  Dear Tash, I am madly jealous, you seem to be having a wonderful time and you must be getting so brown. I am helping in a theatre club in Shaftsbury Avenue. Actually not half as exciting as it sounds because they have only just moved in and the stage is not up yet, so they can’t do any plays, I have been helping get things straight and also served behind the bar!!

  I have been playing masses of tennis with a really sweet Israeli boy called Mike. The only difficulty is keeping him at the proper distance. I also went down with him to stay at the sea in Kent for a few days with some relatives of Shirley which was lovely we tore about madly in a cronky old car. I am probably going there again for three days tomorrow. Mummy and Daddy are off tomorrow and refuse to let me stay alone in the flat.