A Woman on the Edge of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

world, starting a new life.
    It was, my stepmother says, partly why she married him, though he never bought that boat. Instead he carried on with his business, forging it into a success, as we carried on with our family life, holding to the same course we had been on before Hannah’s death, only with a different mother, the old one unmentioned, almost as if she had never existed.
    THE NIGHT BEFORE the article is due out, I can’t sleep, and I get up early and walk down to the newsagent. Opening the newspaper in the street to see the headline, a photograph of Hannah holding me, my hands start shaking, and I glance around, but the street is empty: no one is staring at me.
    As the morning goes on, the phone rings, emails start to arrive — none suggesting I have done anything terrible. My aunt Susie calls, pledging to try to break ‘the old pattern of silence’. Simon’s wife emails with a memory of Simon telling her about Hannah when they first met, warning her that he wasn’t a good bet. He would have appreciated the article, she writes, though I am not sure I could have written it if he was still alive. My father calls to say that several people have spoken to him positively about the article. His voice is a little easier, and I wonder if an old weight might not have lifted a little from him, too.
    Letters also come, from family friends, from strangers to me who write that they knew Hannah. One is from a woman who recalls Hannah coming to her sister’s fancy-dress party as ‘a ravishing Carmen (with a large flower in her hair) aged, oh, maybe 17 or 18. I remember how vivacious and beautiful she was.’ Another is the letter in which David Page, Hannah’s colleague at Hornsey College of Art, writes of her striding the corridors and fancying the students. ‘She was a wonderful vivid person, one of those you never forget. I’m really sorry you never had the chance to know her as an adult, the way we knew her.’
    This letter makes me smile, and I keep it out to show to people, read it again and again. I write to David to thank him, and it is not until several weeks have passed that it occurs to me that I could ask him if he has more memories of her. It is an obvious thought — but to me it is a lightning bolt. It is engrained in me that we do not talk about Hannah in my family. But then David Page is not my family.
    I send him an email, but he writes back to say he that does not think he has much more to tell me. I try the woman who wrote of Hannah as Carmen, but she only met Hannah that one time. I am disappointed, but something has shifted in my mind, and I think about who else I could try.
    The obvious people are two sisters, Sonia and Tasha Edelman, childhood friends of Hannah’s, who figured in my grandmother’s stories. I have met Tasha, and have an added reason to want to see her. Some years ago, I learned from Susie that Tasha had some letters from Hannah, though when I called Tasha she said she had lost them. But Susie tells me now that Tasha’s health, which has been bad for some time, has worsened. She has had a stroke, and barely talks. She suggests instead that I write to Sonia.
    While I am waiting for a reply, I email an old neighbour of ours from Hannah’s time. Deborah Van der Beek — Kartun as she was — is only a few years older than me, but I hope she might be able to give me something of the child’s view of Hannah I never got from Simon and have lost in myself.
    Deborah replies immediately, and a couple of days later I drive to Wiltshire to see her and her mother, who lives nearby. Deborah is an artist, and lives in a beautifully restored Queen Anne vicarage with a walled garden full of her sculptures; but, walking around with her, I find it hard to take anything in, and it is a relief when we sit down to talk about Hannah.
    Deborah’s family were the first to move into the modern development in Highgate where we lived