Without Her

The most powerful, unforgettable sentence I’ve ever read is “We was girls together”, from Toni Morrison’s novel Sula—a gift from a college friend. It was the seventies. I was married with two little ones, pretty much overwhelmed by…everything. Her life, which had taken a turn I’d never have imagined, couldn’t have been more different.

We wrote letters, long ones. She gave me her world, I gave her mine—and, in the process, I became a writer. I grew up, too, waking to changes and possibilities she wrestled with long before I saw they might apply to my life, too.

It was as if an optometrist had flipped a lens and the world beyond my home and family suddenly became visible.

There’s nothing like those early friendships, no other people in your life—no matter how close to your heart—whose presence can take you back to the person you were when you were just beginning.

Rosalind Brackenbury’s Without Her brilliantly depicts the power of such friendships.

The book begins, “A small, thin girl playing chess, one hand against the other, perched on a bench in the cloakroom where girls milled around and the air stank of coke from the boiler: that was my first view of Hannah.”  A bell summons them to lunch but Hannah remains, bent over her chessboard. Claudia, the narrator, waits.

“Later, we stood before the housemistress on a patch of carpet worn away by many miscreants’ feet and muttered, “Yes, Miss McKinley, sorry, Miss McKinley.”

“It was McKinley’s technique to spot and separate potential wrongdoers before they had even begun to do anything really wrong. She let us know this. She had her raptor’s eye upon us, almost from the beginning. She also knew who was what she called the Ringleader, and who the hapless Follower. In our case, it seemed to be Hannah who led, leaving me billed as the stooge. But all this attention to rules and protocol, graces and rituals, tellings-off and forced apologies only made it easier and, yes, more necessary, for us to be the friends we became.”

Chapter Two begins, “That was then. This is now, a lifetime later.”

The two friends have long ago gone their separate ways. Now in their sixties, Claudia’s single and childless, a professor of film studies at a Virginia University. Hannah’s led a traditional life in East Anglia with her husband and business partner Phillip and their two children, spending summers at their home in France. Claudia plans to visit them there, as she usually does at the end of the school year but the semester is still winding down when she receives a message from Phillip.

Claudia, could you ring me back? It’s rather important.”

Hannah wasn’t on the train when Phillip went to meet her in Avignon. She wasn’t on the next train, or the next. His texts and calls have gone unanswered. He’s worried—and Claudia knows her so well. Will she please come early and help him try to find her?

Claudia leaves immediately but spends a day in Paris with her longtime lover Alexandre before continuing to Avignon. They’d met the summer she and Hannah spent traveling around Europe by train, both attracted to him, and Claudia is still haunted by the possibility that Hannah had made love to him once, despite denying it.

She and Alexandre have “a history of hotels,” she says—and again find “the alignment of bodies that we’ve trusted and returned to over so many years. Does this make up a marriage of sorts,” she wonders, “a repetition over the years, an intimacy that has no home and no address, just this sharing of moments, memories, places to which we will never return?

So different from Hannah’s relationship with Phillip. Yet Hannah was the reckless, willful one—sometimes disappearing for days at a time—when they were young. Something Phillip doesn’t know about her.

He’s distraught when Claudia arrives. It’s unlike Hannah to be out of touch. And why isn’t she responding to his messages? Could it be that for some reason she can’t? Is she injured, lying in a hospital somewhere?

The world is a terrible place, the house where once a key was left in a flower pot is now surrounded by an iron fence with a locked gate. Had Hannah been kidnapped?

“Suicide” isn’t spoken, but it is there between them.

Hannah’s adult children arrive and complicate matters, making Claudia wish her friend had “run off with a lover, hitchhiked across Europe, taken a plane to Patagonia, emigrated to Australia. Anywhere, anything to escape.

She’s relieved to receive an email from Alexandre with a summons. He’s heard from Hannah. She’s all right, she plans to return to England in a few days but wants to see Claudia in Paris before she goes.

I won’t say why Hannah disappeared, just that Claudia, the person who knew her best when they were young, is the only person in her life she can imagine able to help her now.

Asked why, she might have said, as Nel did when she forgave Sula, “We was girls together.”

I love everything about Without Her: Its truth and urgency, the way the past is threaded through the present, illuminating it, creating that unsettling sense of living simultaneously in two very different times of our lives. Brackenbury’s writing is gorgeous, her insights into how real life is, how it feels, are profound.

At one point, Claudia observes, “Between two people, always the third thing, the story; neither will ever have the whole picture.”

She’s so right. This can only happen in fiction.

It’s why extraordinary fiction like this matters.