Read Online A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy; Gavron - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜I would have gone anywhere to be with her,’ she says.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜She always told me what to do,’ Tasha says.
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Split up with my boyfriend.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜She decided he was bad for me.’
    â€˜Did you?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she says, and a smile comes slowly again to her face. ‘Then Hannah went out with him.’
    â€˜Hannah told you to split up with him, and then she went out with him?’
    â€˜Yes. Though after she finished with him, I got back together with him.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Some people went all the way,’ she says.
    â€˜Was Hannah one of those?’
    â€˜I would be quite surprised if Hannah wasn’t one of them.’
    â€˜Did you go all the way?’
    She smiles. ‘No.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t have known how.’
    I ask how Hannah knew.
    â€˜Hannah always knew how to get into things. She was always doing, doing. She would go too far, too fast into things.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Hannah was the person he cared about,’ she says.
    â€˜He cared about her?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And how did Hannah feel about him?’
    â€˜She was mad about him. For a long time, I really thought that they loved each other.’
    â€˜She loved him?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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