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

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    Hannah often came to stay. They had a group of friends who lived around Chesham Bois, with whom they would go riding. Amersham still had a squire in those days, and his wife took a particular interest in Hannah and let her keep her pony in their stables. I ask why, and Sonia looks at me if I am being deliberately obtuse. ‘Because Hannah was so charming and attractive and beautiful, of course,’ she says. ‘Not like the average child at all. And a wonderful rider.’
    Sonia and Tasha also competed at the pony club meetings, but it was Hannah who ‘won everything’, though on the rare occasions she lost there would be ‘floods of tears’, and she would need ‘lots of calming down’.
    Sonia was the older, but Hannah was the leader. She remembers a holiday to Bexhill. Hannah took out a rowing boat and managed it perfectly, but when Sonia and Tasha took out a boat, they drifted out to sea and had to be rescued.
    When Hannah went off to board at Frensham Heights in Surrey, Tasha insisted on following her. Sonia was already at another school, but she remembers going with her parents to Frensham and seeing Hannah in a production of The Duchess of Malfi , in which ‘she was brilliant, naturally’.
    She talks of another boating holiday, when they were fifteen or sixteen, to Sweden, run by a man who had sailed with Shackleton. She and Tasha had been with the same group to Holland a year earlier, and Hannah was the newcomer, but she made herself the centre of attention by ‘picking on this rather ordinary boy and deciding to have a passionate affair with him’.
    Hannah was ‘notorious for always wanting to be in love with some boy’. She was ‘always creating dramas around herself’.
    She talks about Hannah and my father, who met when she was seventeen and he was twenty-three, ‘how completely wrapped up in each other they were’.
    She didn’t see so much of Hannah after she was married. The last time they met was when Hannah was interviewing women for The Captive Wife , which must have been a couple of years before her death.
    I ask about Hannah’s suicide, and she says she always assumed it was ‘a dramatic gesture’, that she hadn’t meant to kill herself. Someone had told her that she was expecting the woman whose flat it was to come back. Though she says also that she didn’t think ‘Hannah would have liked ageing. I don’t see her having a happy life.’
    Hannah wasn’t ‘prone to depression’, she says, but she did have ‘fits of despair if things didn’t go her way’. She didn’t like ‘having to compromise’.
    â€˜The thing about Hannah,’ she says, ‘is that you were always interested in her. You were never bored with Hannah.’
    LATER, AT HOME, I stand at the mirror. I have taken pride in my daughter’s resemblance to Hannah, but it is only now, after Sonia’s words at the train station, that it occurs to me to look for my mother in my own face, to reach up and touch my broad jaw, run my finger along my full lips.
    These meetings with the Kartuns and Sonia have left me in an uncertain state. It is only a couple of weeks since I had the idea of writing to David Page in the hope of hearing some more charming stories about Hannah, but in that time my expectations have both risen and been dampened.
    When Sonia talked about Hannah I could tell that she saw her vividly in her own mind, was remembering a whole world; but without any memories of Hannah myself, her memories are only words, stories.
    At the same time, I am not sure how much I liked some of what she told me: about Hannah being a poor loser, her need to be the centre of attention, how she was notorious for having to be in love with someone or other. Do I really want to know that Hannah wasn’t always such a magical figure?
    What Sonia said about Hannah not wanting to grow old also