Twelve

WHAT IS MISSING in all this is a contribution from Hannah herself — her voice, her own words. I have been thinking more and more about her letters to Tasha, and I talk to Susie, and we come up with a plan. We will go to see Tasha together and persuade her to let us look for the letters. But two days before we are due in Oxford, Susie calls. Tasha has had another stroke, and is dead.

A week later, we go instead to Tasha’s funeral. Tasha’s estranged children do not come, but I meet Esther, her daughter from her second marriage.

It is not the time to ask about the letters, and I store away my thoughts of them. But a couple of months later, Susie mentions she is seeing Sonia, and I ask her to inquire about the letters, and a few days later I receive an email from Esther. She has the letters, but is not sure what to do. There are personal things in them — nothing particularly revealing, but private things about her mother, her aunt.

I understand her hesitation, the draw of secrecy. But now that the letters have been found, I can think of nothing else. I write to Esther, explaining how important they are to me, that my interest is in Hannah, not in Tasha’s or Sonia’s secrets. She replies that she is going away, and suggests we speak when she returns. The days pass slowly, but eventually she calls to say I can have the letters.

When I arrive at her flat, she has them spread out on the floor. There are about thirty, mostly handwritten, a few typed, on different kinds of paper. I pick one up and try to read it, but I can’t concentrate. I am like a man who has never seen a whole book and is let into a library. I am too dizzy to read.

Esther found the letters, she tells me, not hidden away in the attic, but under ‘H’ in Tasha’s filing cabinet. I would have walked past this cabinet when I went to see Tasha.

She wants to make copies of the parts about Tasha and her family, so we go out to a copy shop. When this is done, in the white envelope in which Tasha stored them, Hannah’s name circled in black ink on the front, some ten years after I first heard of their existence, I take possession of them. I walk back to the underground station in a daze, and begin reading them on the train. They stretch from when Hannah was fifteen until she was twenty. The loopy handwriting, by now not unfamiliar to me, becomes neater, smaller, as the years pass. The spelling and punctuation and grammar improve a little, though not much.

I am still reading when I reach my station. I get out and sit on a bench while more trains come and go.

IN THE DAYS AFTERWARDS, I do not know what to feel or think. I have dreamed for so long of these letters, what they might tell me, the roads they might open into Hannah’s mind. As long as they eluded me, they could be anything. But now that I have them, they are what they are — a teenage girl’s letters. They are the nearest to Hannah, the most of her, I will ever get, and it does not seem very much.

I put them on a shelf, and for a couple of weeks I cannot bring myself to look at them again. But eventually I go back to them, read them again more slowly. There might be no great intimations here, nothing beyond the ordinary, but isn’t that what I wanted — the ordinary Hannah, the real Hannah?

The Hannah who makes me smile now when I read that ‘Sonia only had one line — but she was excellent and showed great signs of talent’; makes me laugh when she writes that ‘I dont want to go out much as I have a lot of work to do — lying on the ground breathing in and out’. My mother, I discover, was funny.

I discover, too, that I like her. She could be solipsistic, bossy, dismissive of others, but there is also an openness, a naturalness, in these letters that warms me to her. I have heard about how ‘dramatic’ she was, her need to be the centre of attention, but while she clearly felt things strongly, said what she thought, she is calmer and softer here than I expected — more wry and self-deprecating than melodramatic (‘apart from the fact that I am dead tired and horribly fat life is quite pleasant’.) Her default mode may have been irony and irreverence, which I appreciate, but I am also touched by her youthful earnestness about her acting, the headmaster, my father, university, her advice to Tasha (‘you seem in a bad way, but Tash, if he hasn’t answered don’t for heaven sake write again’.)

It is pleasing to read in her own words about things I have heard from elsewhere, such as secretarial school, which makes more sense now that I see in these letters how young she was, unformed, or RADA, which comes alive to me now for the first time.

There is also disappointment. The fancy-dress party she writes about in one of the letters must have been, from the date, the one where I decided she met my father, but she does not mention him, and he does not appear in the letters for several more months. I reluctantly have to accept that this party was not the occasion when my parents met, or met again.

When she does write about my father, I find her gushing about him, her references to their nights, a little embarrassing. Though that in itself is a new sensation for me — to be getting too much information about my mother, from my mother.

SHE WAS CLEARLY more sexually advanced than the average middle-class girl in the pre-pill era, if that was hardly difficult. Jessica Mann, who was born in the same year as Hannah, writes in The Fifties Mystique of conducting a poll among women with whom she had been at Cambridge and finding that the average age of first sexual intercourse was 23.6 years. But the letters suggest Hannah spent more time fending off boys than doing anything with them.

They also seem to confirm what I suspected — that she saw her ‘pashes’ for boys and her relationship with the headmaster as somehow separate things that could exist alongside each other. ‘Look after K,’ she writes to Tasha. ‘He is much nicer than one imagines in the hols. I had a nice letter from Mike.’

The letters corroborate, in her own words, that something definitely went on with the headmaster. As Shirley had told me, he wrote to her, chased her up to London. He even called in unannounced to her home. Though the letters leave me scarcely the wiser as to what it all meant. He is a ‘darling’, she writes in one mood. It is comforting to have him ‘believing so utterly’ in her. She misses him ‘like hell’. But when he turns up at the old Frenshamian evening, she ‘felt as if I was going to dissolve’, and when he tries to get her alone in his Rolls: ‘Oh Tash it’s upset me ... Godinheaven — its all wrong.’

I search for clues. What does it mean that she uses the word ‘affair’ to describe what was clearly no more than a flirtation on the airplane to Paris? I look up the Macmurray she writes about as a favourite of the headmaster. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher whose central philosophy was that it is in ‘community with others that we discover who we really are’. Is this what the headmaster was doing with Hannah? Being in community with her?

I need help, and I give the letters to a neighbour who is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Her initial impression, she responds, is ‘of a lively and excitable young woman in search of a convincing part for herself in relation to men — femme fatale or vulnerable ingénue, woman of the world or giddy adolescent. It seems impossible from these letters alone to tell whether they actually did or didn’t have sexual intercourse because Hannah seems to exaggerate some aspects of what she got up to and to minimise others.’

Though when I tell her about the other evidence I have gathered — Shirley’s diary, Bill Will’s comments, the headmaster’s dismissal, his wife being a schoolgirl and he a teacher when they met — she explains how a young person can be ‘inducted’ by a powerful older figure. The victim’s view of what is right or wrong gets subverted so that she does not realise that ‘what is happening is wrong, is taught to talk about abuse as love’.

She talks, and I read up too, about common patterns of abuse. How the person in power tells his victims that they are special, as Hannah wrote of the headmaster idealising her; singles them out for private lessons, as the headmaster invited Hannah to his study for her ‘extra German’; inculcates them with his ideas, as he did with Macmurray. It can be difficult, the literature suggests, to distinguish between inspirational teachers and abusive ones: sexual abusers can also be inspirational, which can be specially confusing for the children.

My neighbour explains also about the correlation between sexual abuse and later psychological troubles, including suicide — how these often emerge in the victim’s twenties, the childhood experiences leaving the victim ‘brittle’. The fact that Hannah was a strong personality wouldn’t necessarily have helped, she says; ‘the whole of that terrific force gets turned against herself’.

IS THAT HOW it was with Hannah? Her letters don’t say, don’t reveal any such darkness, take me only anyway to the age of twenty. This is all I have of her voice, that ‘husky voice’, as my grandfather wrote in his diary. With its ‘slight South African accent’, Hannah wrote to Tasha. ‘Such a pleasant, well-modulated voice,’ Phyll Willmott wrote in her diary. ‘A singularly expressive part of her whole personality. She could “pun” with it when pleased, chuckle with it or grin when amused, and use it as a hammer when arguing fiercely about this or that.’

But there are still a few other voices to hear — including the two witnesses to her last months, last days, who my grandfather sought out after her death. I can no more speak to Anne Wicks than I can Hannah, but after reading Hannah’s letters it occurs to me that Anne might have left letters or diaries that could throw light on Hannah’s story. An obituary mentions a close friend in the advertising world. I call her, and she offers to pass on a message to Anne’s children.

While I am waiting, I go through the entries about Anne in my grandfather’s diaries. After his talk with her, he wrote that she was ‘not as much a villain’ as my father suggested; but as time passes, his references grow more critical again. At first, he writes only that she was a ‘hypnotic influence’, but in April 1966, four months after Hannah’s death, he says something more specific: Anne told Hannah that publishing The Captive Wife would do ‘irreparable harm’ to her career. In December 1967, the second anniversary of Hannah’s death, he expands this to Anne having ‘depressed Hannah about her book, her marriage, her prospects’. And in 1969 he elaborates a little further: ‘Anne Wicks saying a) leave your husband b) John’ll never marry you c) your work is preposterous.’

Armed with these allegations, I go back to my father. He was angry with Anne, he says, because she ‘encouraged’ Hannah to have an affair. Anne had left her husband, ‘was enjoying her newfound freedom, and made Hannah feel that she was missing out on life’. But Anne’s marriage to Tony wasn’t ‘serious’ like his and Hannah’s; it only lasted a few years, and there weren’t any children.

He doesn’t know anything about Anne telling Hannah that John Hayes would never marry her, though she was right. He did know that Anne was ‘very down on’ The Captive Wife, and that ‘Hannah took these criticisms very seriously’. She told Hannah it would ‘ruin her reputation’, though he can’t say why.

To my surprise, he says that Anne wrote to him not long before she died, asking to meet him. What did he do? I ask. Tore up the letter and threw it away, he says. Did he think she was writing because she knew she had cancer? He didn’t know, he says, didn’t want to meet. What good would it have done?

I AM ONLY MORE INTRIGUED, though. What kind of friend was Anne Wicks? What kind of person? Are my father’s, my grandfather’s, accusations justified?

My grandfather kept only two of the transcripts of his interviews for his book about intellectuals: Hannah’s and Anne Wicks’s. Hannah, I presume, recommended Anne to my grandfather.

‘From Bromley, Kent,’ he noted. ‘Father, bricklayer. 11-plus. Went to Bromley Grammar School. Why not try for Oxbridge? It seemed out of reach.’

Like Hannah, she started a PhD in sociology at Bedford ‘but gave it up. Felt that working in too much isolation.’

Instead Hannah gave her an introduction to my grandfather’s friend Mark Abrams, whose name had helped Hannah get into Bedford. Anne got ‘a good basic training’ in social and market research at Abrams’s company, and went to work at Thomson newspapers, where she was made head of market research at the age of twenty-six.

‘I don’t take any notice of the fact that I’m a woman,’ she said, ‘and I don’t let anyone else do so.’ She no longer had ‘much contact with girls at Bedford College but knows that a high proportion of them have a husband and two children and have stopped working entirely’. Single again herself, she said that when women marry, they seem to her to ‘turn into cabbages overnight’.

INSTEAD OF ANNE’S CHILDREN, I hear from Di Hibel, a friend of Anne’s they ask to contact me. Di was at Bedford, too, she tells me when we meet, though a couple of years behind Hannah and Anne. She remembers seeing Hannah once in the library. She was pregnant with me, and wearing a man’s shirt.

‘Annie,’ as she calls her, as Hannah had on her suicide note, ‘was very angry with Hannah for what she did to her,’ Di says. ‘She told me she did it in her flat, and she didn’t want to talk about it.’

Anne never married — ‘was wedded to her job’ — though she had three children by two different fathers, Di says. She had a successful career in market research and account planning. She became a Thatcherite in her later years, and even considered trying to become a Tory MP.

DI DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT — Anne’s children didn’t mention — any diaries or letters, but instead serendipity opens another door. Tony Wicks had talked of some friends of Anne, a couple who lived in Chalcot Square, but I have almost forgotten about them until I hear my sister-in-law mentioning their uncommon name. Margaret and Rainer Schuelein, it turns out, are her next-door neighbours — were my brother’s neighbours for the last fifteen years of his life.

I have often seen them, I realise, have even said hello to them on the street. Now I call them, and they invite me round. They are gentle, soft spoken. ‘Annie,’ they say, was ‘the most wonderful friend.’ She was ‘charming, bright, opinionated, full of life’.

They knew Hannah a bit — they had dinner with her and my father and Anne and Tony a couple of times. They moved to this house before Hannah died, and Margaret even remembers Hannah coming here once. She doesn’t think she came in, but can remember her standing on the front drive with Anne. She was with her son in a pushchair — with me, it must have been.

I ask if they ever said anything to Simon. No, they say, they weren’t sure he would have wanted them to tell him. ‘Once something is said it can’t be unsaid,’ they say. It might have created unease between neighbours.

Were they still friends with Anne when my brother was living next door? I ask. ‘Oh, yes,’ they say. ‘Annie often came here.’

I try to imagine her sitting in this room while my brother was a few feet away on the other side of the dividing wall. Perhaps she sat on sunny days in the garden while my brother and his boys were playing on their grass. Did the boys ever kick a ball across, did she pick it up, hand it back to her friend’s son, one of her friend’s grandsons? Perhaps it was after such a moment that she wrote to my father, asking to meet him. I ask the Schueleins, but they can’t say, didn’t know that Anne had written to my father, though she knew who their neighbour was.

They show me some photographs of a young Anne — a tall, large-boned, good-looking young woman, her short dress emphasising a belly swollen in pregnancy, her hair in a similar Mary Quant bob to Hannah’s.

They have something else to show me, too: Margaret’s diary from 1965. Anne and her boyfriend, it reveals, had supper with them the night Hannah died. She shows me the page: ‘Supper Ghriam and Annie and pheasant here.’

I stare at these words, try to make sense of them. Of course, once she had told my grandparents, Anne wouldn’t have wanted to go back to her flat, would have sought out her boyfriend, her friends, for company and solace. I understand that Margaret might not have wanted to write about Hannah’s suicide in her diary. But there is something about the ‘pheasant’ that upsets me — that this was what she chose to note in her diary on the day of Hannah’s suicide in Anne’s flat, that she and Anne and their men supped on pheasant.

I COMPOSE MYSELF, can hardly blame acquaintances for the evasions that my own family were guilty of, that I have been guilty of. And there are questions I still need to ask, about my father’s and grandfather’s allegations.

It was true, they say, when I ask about Anne encouraging Hannah to have an affair, that Anne thought my father too ‘manly and controlling’, though the way they saw it, the two women ‘egged each other on to reject their husbands’.

They agree, though, that Anne was ‘negative’ about Hannah’s book. ‘She thought Hannah had based it on too small a group of people, too small to be serious.’ As they say this, I think I understand. The Captive Wife was a work of qualitative research, based on conversations with ninety-six women. Anne, in contrast, was a quantitative market researcher, used to polling thousands of people. To her, Hannah’s book would have been statistically meaningless.

Though it is only later that the irony sinks that it was Hannah who introduced Anne to Mark Abrams, who trained her in statistical research.

AS I AM LEAVING, I mention my hopes about Anne’s papers, thinking that the Schueleins might put in a good word with her children, but Margaret tells me instead that she has some letters from Anne — from the period just after Hannah died. They went abroad for a year, and Anne house-sat for them and looked after their affairs, dealt with their post, ‘forged our signatures on everything’.

She’ll have to find the letters, Margaret says, and the next day she calls, and I go back and read them on a table against the party wall with my brother’s house.

The top one is dated 14 January 1966, exactly a month after Hannah’s death. Anne writes of being invited to supper with Hannah’s Hornsey colleague, Michael Kidron, and his wife, Nina. ‘It was a rather nice evening, slightly saddened for me because Nina had only the day before heard of Hannah’s death and was anxious to know why it could have happened. I filled in some of the background for her because she knew the basis of the story anyway.’

Anne feels ‘a bit bad about having broken a sort of promise’ to my father, presumably not to talk about Hannah’s death, ‘but the story Nina had was worse for him in that she thought he had left her’. She put off seeing some other people, she writes, ‘because I don’t want to go through the Hannah saga again’.

‘Incidentally,’ she writes, ‘isn’t it a small world?’:

Wicks knows Schueleins

Schueleins know Kidrons

Wicks knows Gavrons

Gavrons knows Kidrons.

In the next letter, a month or so later, she writes of deciding to stay on in her flat rather than buy a place, ‘because it is just too complicated and I thought it would be nice to have a bit of spare cash for a while rather than taking on another heavy financial commitment now’. She has had ‘a bad patch’ when she ‘replaced my Hannah miseries’ with miseries about the two men she is seeing, but is better now. She ends by sending her affections to the Schueleins’ son, Max. ‘I am terribly sorry to miss several months of Max growing up.’

I understand, as with Margaret’s diary, that these letters do not tell the whole story, that what we say and what we feel are seldom the same thing. But I still can’t help being taken aback by some of the things she writes, her tone, what she does not write. The ‘Hannah saga’, for example, as if the main thing about Hannah’s death was that it was irksome to her. The dance of people who know each other that doesn’t mention that one of these people has stopped dancing. When she writes of her sadness at missing months of her friend’s son’s life, I wonder whether it occurred to her that Hannah would be missing all of her own sons’ lives — that we would be missing all of Hannah’s.

The last letter is dated 14 December, the date of Hannah’s death, and at first I assume it is a year later, but as I read it I realise that it is from a year earlier. Anne has been to the ballet with Hannah, and ‘absolutely loved it’. She has also ‘found a flat — in Chalcot Square. There was a board up so I phoned the agent, and then I went to see it this morning.’ It is the flat where Hannah died, and I read her description of its rooms — the kitchen ‘smaller than yours but larger than mine and quite large enough to eat in comfortably’.

I HAVE HAD John Hayes’s telephone number for a year now, without finding the courage to call him. A friend of my stepmother knows him. He still lives, she told me, with the man he was living with when he was seeing Hannah, who is also called John. The two Johns, she calls them.

Not for the first time, I sit with the number and a phone in front of me. Even this makes me nervous. This is the man who had an affair with my mother, ‘cuckolded’ my father. Over whom she killed herself.

It is mid-morning. He is probably out, I tell myself. What if I just dial, listen to his voice on the answer machine?

I watch my finger move from one key to the next, listen to the echo of the rings. One, two. Before I can hang up, a man’s voice answers, says that he is John.

I panic. Which John is it? I am looking for John Hayes, I say.

‘This is John Hayes.’

The voice is softer, posher, more velvety than I have imagined — though what I have imagined I do not know, only not this, perhaps not anything.

I could still hang up, but I do not. I explain, as well as I can, my hand shaking, who I am, what I want, and the velvety voice responds slowly, calmly. Yes, he will see me, he says. He is going to the physio for his neck tomorrow, and it always hurts for several days afterwards, so he suggests we meet one day next week, at the Charing Cross Hotel, in the upstairs café.

An hour later, he calls back. There is a tremor in his voice now. He has been disturbed by my phone call, he says. We should meet sooner. Tomorrow. He will come into town after his physio. The same place.

I hardly sleep. I arrive early at the hotel and I go upstairs, but there is a function in the café, so it is closed to the general public. I come down to the lobby and walk up and down until I realise that I have twice, three times, walked past a man hunched in a scarf and coat in a chair in an alcove.

I look at him. He looks at me. John? Yes.

He stands up; we shake hands. He is smaller than I imagined — in my mind he has always been tall. He is older, too — I was looking, I realise, for a younger man. Though he is no older than his age. White hair, a squarish face, watery blue eyes. In an email later, he will tell me that he, too, hardly slept the previous night.

We sit. Perhaps we discuss drinks, order them. I do not remember. I explain again my need to know about Hannah. He will answer any questions, he says, though when I ask if I can take notes he looks alarmed. Better not, he says. His voice seems less velvety in person, more pained, kindlier.

I suggest we start at the beginning, his first meeting with Hannah, and he says it was 1964 — no, 65. ‘What year was it?’ he says, fumbling over his words.

I help him work out the date, my journalist self taking control. It was the autumn of 1964 — he arrived at the college a year after Hannah.

What was his impression of Hannah? I ask.

‘She was the princess of the college,’ he says.

‘I have to write that down,’ I say, and he says okay, and from here on I take notes.

What does he mean by princess? I ask.

‘One she was beautiful, and two she had an intense clarity of mind that burned like the sun,’ he says. ‘By princess, I mean she was the person in control — she quickly established herself as the leading member of our group, and put others in the shade.’

He is more confident now, and he talks with a quiet, staccato eloquence about Hornsey, how the general studies course was new, how he and Hannah and others were forging it together, would have discussions, arguments. He and Hannah were ‘quite antagonistic to each other at first, belligerent even’. He was a grammar-school boy who had been to Oxford to study philosophy, he says, so he was ‘quite confident himself, quite bright and brash’.

‘Hannah and I were the children, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, the youngest in the department,’ he says. ‘The belligerence grew into affection.’

I have to understand the times, he says. ‘There was an effervescence in the air. A feeling that we could do things, Britain itself seemed at that moment capable of creating a dynamic new culture, cinema, theatre. Hannah and I were drunk on this metaphorically, and it created an alliance between us.’

It was an uneasy alliance at first. ‘Hannah used to drop in halfway through my lectures and sit at the back and make herself conspicuous, as was her style. The first time this happened I said, “What are you doing snooping on my lecture,” and she said, “I want to see what you’re like. You’re new, are you any good?” ’

He remembers one occasion. ‘We were interviewing candidates, students, and she said I should start, so I asked this schoolboy whether he thought flowers could feel pain. I wanted to ask him something he wouldn’t be prepared for. And Hannah snorted. I ignored her, asked my questions, and she asked hers, but at the break I asked her why she had been so ill-mannered, and she said I was being so Oxford and pompous.’ They laughed; the ice was broken.

He and the other John met at Oxford and had been together for ten years by the time he met Hannah. They had both had affairs, but he had never slept with a woman before Hannah, and has never done so since. So why her? I ask. ‘I was intoxicated by her combination of beauty and clarity and candour.’

He had ‘always been attracted intellectually, emotionally, to women’. But with Hannah there was a ‘physical intensity’, a passion, that intrigued him.

Hannah made the running, set up their meetings in Anne Wicks’s flat, though they only met there three or four times in total. He wasn’t very good with her in bed; she had to encourage him, as he found it a bit tawdry. ‘That step to me was a step I shouldn’t have taken,’ he says. Before the summer, the relationship had been ‘all about affection, a hidden affection, which produces an intensity in itself’. It was only after the summer that it became sexual.

What he cared about was the ‘wonderful mutuality’ they had with each other, the excited intellectual talk. ‘We were in a highly combustible state in our excitement over ideas. We had the feeling that what we talked about mattered.’

But once they had taken the step into bed, Hannah started getting more serious. He didn’t know that my father had moved out and, when he did, John was ‘disturbed morally’. He came ‘from a small rural community in Lancashire and had a very ethical system of living’. He was pulled along by Hannah, but ‘after a time I felt I didn’t want to go any further, and I began to pull back’.

A couple of Saturdays before Hannah died, she hosted a party at our house for staff and students from Hornsey. My father was there, too. ‘It was the first time I met your father, or at least saw him. I don’t think we actually met. But I looked across a room and knew who he was, and I was sure that he knew who I was.’

This was ‘crucial’ for John — coming to our house, seeing my father, seeing my brother’s and my toothbrushes in the bathroom. ‘I saw her family, and realised I was committing adultery.’ He got ‘very drunk, and went into the bathroom and covered the mirror with messages in shaving foam’.

There was another episode the week before Hannah died. He went out for lunch with her, and she said she wanted to show him something, ‘and we walked along a street and she pointed up at a flat and said, “That’s where we are going to live,” and I said, “We?” and she said, “Yes, you and I! We can make a go of it. I’ll have the children with me, of course.” ’

John had a ‘major recoil’. He suddenly realised she was being serious, that this was more than an adventure for her.

They had arranged to meet on the afternoon of Hannah’s death at Anne Wicks’s flat, but he rang her the night before or that morning to say he wasn’t coming, that they had to stop. ‘We argued, and she said, “I’ll still be there if you change your mind.” ’

He had a six o’clock lecture, but afterwards he decided he ‘wasn’t dealing with this in the proper manner’ and that he needed to talk to her face to face. ‘I went to Chalk Farm station, and when I got out I thought I’d ring the flat to see if she was there, but I got no reply. I called her home, and your father answered and said she was dead.’

Anne Wicks had told my grandfather that she had found John on her steps. This might be true, he says, but he has no memory of it. He knows that he eventually went home that night. The other John knew about Hannah, so he was able to tell him what had happened, but they never talked about it. I ask why. ‘You carry on with life.’

He has often thought about it, though. ‘In trying to come to terms with it,’ he says, ‘I came to believe that she’d embarked on something and it hadn’t worked.’ He believes the act itself was ‘spur of the moment’, but thinks ‘it was in her mind as an abstract idea for some time’, and that when her fantasy of making a new life with him was ‘pricked’, she ‘went for it’.

‘I think of my own stupidity, carelessness,’ he says, shaking his head sadly.

Of Hannah’s personality he says, ‘Aut Caesar aut nihil’ — either Caesar or nothing.

‘She wanted clarity,’ he says. ‘She couldn’t live with imperfection, compromise.’ Later, typing up my notes, I think about this: how we have all had to live with the compromises she left for us.

His meeting with my grandfather was ‘civilised’, he says. He was still in a state of shock, feeling completely negative about himself, but my grandfather gave him ‘a rope to pick myself up a bit’ — ‘a picture of someone who was in psychological turmoil’.

He asked for a piece of her jewelry, but my grandfather told him that was ‘impossible’.

I ask about the sleeping pills he told my grandfather that she carried, but he doesn’t remember saying that — or about any pills.

He saw my father once more, on an early-morning flight from Venice. ‘I recognised him, he was with his new wife, we exchanged glances — nothing more.’

He has had close women friends since Hannah, though never quite like Hannah, and never anything sexual. He mentions the novelist Angela Carter, and the publisher Carmen Callil, an old friend of my father’s.

Did he ever talk to Carmen about Hannah?

This is the first time he has ever spoken of her, he says.

We have both spent much of the conversation in tears, and his cheeks are wet now. ‘She is always there in my mind,’ he says. ‘The ghost comes back.’