A Woman on the Edge of Time Read Online Free PDF

next door to each other, she tells me, and we were the second. Her parents were quite a bit older than mine, but they soon became good enough friends to go away together. Deborah talks about a holiday in the New Forest, when Hannah took her riding in the frost, and another in the south of France, when she remembers my parents dressing up to go dancing in St Tropez, Hannah in ‘fitting slacks with foot straps, looking glamorous, laughing’, and my father ‘clearly terribly proud of her beauty and vibrancy’.
    Hannah was almost young enough to be Deborah’s big sister, and she remembers her skipping and playing hula-hoop with her in the garden. She was fascinated by Hannah, she says, how ‘pretty and vivacious’ she was, how she could be ‘feminine, but also tomboyish’. The families sometimes shared the school run, and Deborah talks of being in Hannah’s car, a little Fiat, when she drove along the pavement to get around traffic — one of my grandmother’s stories.
    Later, we drive to the next village to see her mother. Gwen begins by saying how clearly she remembers Hannah, what a ‘terrific sense of humour’ she had, how attractive and genuine she was, ‘down to earth, not phony at all’. But when I press her for more details, her eyes grow misty. She is in her late eighties, and the times we are talking about are half a century ago.
    The only specific memory she can come up with is of the weekend before Hannah’s death. She and her husband had flown to Paris, leaving Deborah and her sister with the au pair girl, but the night they were due back there was fog at Orly airport, and the planes were grounded.
    When Gwen called home to say they were having to stay another night in Paris, the au pair told her that Mrs Gavron had telephoned. If she had known, if she had had any idea, she would have phoned Hannah immediately, she says. But she didn’t know, how could she have known? — she didn’t even know that my parents’ marriage was in difficulties. A year or two earlier, we had moved to another, slightly larger house in the same development, and though it was only around the corner, she hadn’t seen so much of Hannah.
    â€˜I didn’t know she was depressive,’ she says.
    â€˜She was depressive?’
    â€˜Well, she must have been, mustn’t she?’ she says. ‘To do what she did.’
    A COUPLE OF DAYS later, I take the train down to Bristol to see Sonia Edelman, or Jackson as she is now. Staring out of the train window, I am excited, nervous, as if I am going on an assignation. The Kartuns were friends, neighbours, but Sonia was Hannah’s childhood intimate — the possessor, surely, of some deeper knowledge.
    Sonia has offered to meet me at the station, and when I walk out, the first thing she says is, ‘You look like Hannah.’ I feel myself blushing. It is the first time anyone has ever told me I look like my mother.
    Sonia herself is handsome, her hair still blonde, though I am taken aback by how old she is. I always think of Hannah as young, never more than twenty-nine, but Sonia is in her seventies. Glancing at her as she walks to the car, trying to imagine Hannah this age, is like trying to imagine a fairy-tale princess as a grandmother.
    In the car, Sonia starts talking in a rush about Hannah, their childhoods in the Buckinghamshire countryside, her own family. ‘But you know this,’ she keeps saying, and I have to keep telling her that I don’t, that all I know is that during the war Hannah lived in a cottage on the edge of Amersham, that it was here she locked the housekeeper in the chicken shed.
    Hannah and my grandparents moved to Amersham in 1942, Sonia thinks, when Hannah was six. The Edelmans were already living in a big house with a tennis court a couple of miles away in posher Chesham Bois — Sonia’s father, Maurice Edelman, was a novelist and Labour member of