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.

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?

IT IS A TANTALISING story in itself — the lost boy, lost boys even, in the forest — but it is more than that. This is the man who abused my mother, turned her into a lost girl walking down a corridor at night. I need to know what he was capable of.

Armed with this new information, I search in The Times online archive, and within moments I am staring at a headline from 19 April 1936: ‘Caught in a Blizzard — Five London Boys Dead’.

I have to pay to read more, and I key in my credit-card details. The article that comes up is about a party of twenty-seven boys from the Strand School in Brixton, on a walking holiday in the Black Forest, led by a single teacher, twenty-eight years of age. After spending their first night at a hostel, the party set off in the morning to climb the Schauinsland mountain. There was a light sleet when they left, the paper records, but by mid-afternoon it was snowing heavily:

During the next few hours several of the boys became weaker and finally collapsed. The older ones carried their packs and helped them along until their strength also gave out. The teacher, who had been carrying the youngest boy in the party for about a mile, finally stayed behind with four of the exhausted boys and sent some stronger ones on to try to find their way down to the village. They reached the village at about 8pm. The villagers immediately formed search parties, and under great difficulties and danger to themselves twice made their way with sledges up to the exhausted boys. It was not until 11.30 pm that the last of them with their teacher was brought down to safety in the village inn, where six boys who were unconscious were given artificial respiration.

Hunched over the computer, I follow the story through the pages of the Times. The survivors were saved by the ringing of a church bell, which guided them to the village. The bodies were repatriated in ‘black-stained coffins, made from the timber of the woods in which they died’. ‘Herr Hitler’ sent wreaths of ‘arum lilies and fir, tied with white silk and draped in swastikas’.

An enquiry exonerated the headmaster of any blame. The unseasonal storm was ‘catastrophic and beyond all calculation’. The headmaster, the inquiry concluded, showed ‘courage and fortitude’. But something nags at me. I go back over the articles and read how, even after one of the boys ‘showed signs of collapsing’, the headmaster continued to push for the summit of the mountain.

There is something familiar about this, and I call Susan Downes and ask her again about going up the mountain with K. There were only a couple of lifts, she says, so they were taught to put skins on their skis and walk up the mountain. It was hard work, but the headmaster insisted they keep going until they reached a hut he had set as their target, even though it was already growing dangerously dark.

I go to the newspaper library in Colindale and order up other newspapers. In the Daily Telegraph, I read that some of the boys were already floundering ‘up to their necks’ in the snow when they met a group of woodcutters, who directed them on up the hill. Why had the headmaster not asked these woodcutters for help? To guide the boys back down to a village or an inn? Why had he kept going up in the storm when he could have gone down?

I go to the London Metropolitan Archives to read the report of the inquiry. From this, I learn that the headmaster had been a star pupil at the Strand School before becoming a teacher there, had been head boy, captain of football, cricket. I learn, too, that he had spent his vacations from Cambridge leading school parties on mountain excursions in the Swiss Alps. After university, he worked in the German Alps, guiding skiing and climbing tours.

In the newspaper reports, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the headmaster’s testimony. But here, in its full length, his account is more logical. In this version of the story, the snow was not yet too deep or heavy when they met the woodcutters, and it was not so much the top of the hill for which he was heading but an inn he believed was on the other side.

I still have my suspicions — did his experience in the mountains make him overconfident? — but I am alone in them. ‘I can say with a clear conscience that the master in charge of the boys behaved in a very brave and manly fashion,’ one of the villagers who helped to bring the boys off the mountain testified. ‘He was the last to come in from the mountain slopes where he did everything to put heart into the children and to help them out.’

The tragedy, the inquiry concludes, was caused by freak weather, not human error. The headmaster of the school, arriving in Freiburg two days later, found ‘a clear sky and a hot sun — comparable to a hot June day in England’.

HERE IN LONDON, the summer is drawing on, the days shortening. I am exhausted by the past few weeks, by obsessing over Hannah and the headmaster. But I still have one more task — to go to Oxford to see Tasha Edelman.

Tasha doesn’t speak on the phone, so I made the arrangements through her niece, Sonia’s daughter, Becky, who also lives in Oxford.

Before going to Tasha’s, I meet up with Becky. She tells me about Tasha’s health. After a car accident, which caused a stroke, she had recovered and gone back to work as a psychiatrist. But subsequent strokes had diminished her.

We talk, too, about Tasha’s troubles with her son and daughter from her first marriage. When the children were young, she left her husband for another man and lost custody of them, and as they grew older they refused to see her. Becky talks of Tasha leaving birthday and Christmas presents for them on the doorstep of their house, and never hearing anything. She subsequently remarried and had another daughter, but she hasn’t seen her older children in years.

It is hard for me to understand: to be searching for a mother who is forever out of reach, and to hear of these children who have a mother they will not see.

BECKY DROPS ME at Tasha’s house, and I follow Tasha into a back room piled with old books and magazines. The curtains are pulled shut, but the material is so thin that the sunlight shines through them and I can see the dust in the air. Tasha herself is like a ghost. The last time I saw her, more than a decade ago, she was overweight, but now her clothes hang off her. Her hair is long and grey, her eyes gazing through big round glasses. She moves and talks immensely slowly, with long pauses while she thinks or searches for the right words.

I ask her about following Hannah to Frensham.

‘I would have gone anywhere to be with her,’ she says.

‘Why?’ I ask.

She smiles. ‘She was so fascinating.’

Sonia had talked when I saw her about Hannah leading Tasha into trouble, and I ask her about this.

‘She always told me what to do,’ Tasha says.

‘Like what?’

‘Split up with my boyfriend.’

‘Why?’

‘She decided he was bad for me.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and a smile comes slowly again to her face. ‘Then Hannah went out with him.’

‘Hannah told you to split up with him, and then she went out with him?’

‘Yes. Though after she finished with him, I got back together with him.’

‘The thing about Hannah,’ she says, after a long pause, ‘was that she had to have what she wanted when she wanted it, and everyone else had to get out of the way.’

‘You make her sound like a character out of The Lord of the Flies.’

There is another silence, and then she says, ‘She was fierce, but there was also a very looking-after side of her. She looked after me.’

She talks about how Hannah was ‘always smiting boys left, right, and centre’.

I ask whether serious relationships were common at the school.

‘Some people went all the way,’ she says.

‘Was Hannah one of those?’

‘I would be quite surprised if Hannah wasn’t one of them.’

‘Did you go all the way?’

She smiles. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I wouldn’t have known how.’

I ask how Hannah knew.

‘Hannah always knew how to get into things. She was always doing, doing. She would go too far, too fast into things.’

‘Is that how it was with the headmaster?’

She thinks for a while. ‘I suppose it was.’

There was something ‘mesmeric’ about the headmaster, she says. ‘When he spoke, you had to listen. You always wanted to hear what he had to say. He made you want to do well at everything.’

‘Hannah was the person he cared about,’ she says.

‘He cared about her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how did Hannah feel about him?’

‘She was mad about him. For a long time, I really thought that they loved each other.’

‘She loved him?’

‘I think he was the love of her life before your father.’

I tell her what Susan Downes said about the headmaster being cold, how Hannah came to his study at the wrong time and he was cruel to her.

‘I don’t think he was cruel to Hannah,’ Tasha says slowly. ‘I think Hannah threw him over because she met your father.’

Can this be true? Is it her professional opinion as a psychiatrist? Or is she seeing Hannah and the headmaster through a fifteen-year-old’s eyes, her understanding frozen in the past, like Hannah herself?

I ask about Hannah’s suicide. She doesn’t think it was depression — more not being able to see a way she could cope any more.

Cope with what? I ask.

‘Not getting what she wanted.’

What did she want? I ask. But she only smiles.

I ask again about Hannah’s letters. When I had spoken to Tasha on the phone several years back, she had suggested they were lost in her attic, and I offer now to go up into the attic to look for them, but she shakes her head.

It is important, I say, I have almost nothing of Hannah’s, no personal writing. But she only shrugs sadly.

It has started raining outside. We sit in silence, the rain coming down. ‘I do so still miss Hannah,’ she says.