Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Or perhaps born something else.

  My parents had to get married. This was quite a disgraceful procedure in 1940, though the alternative was worse. My mother never made a secret of it but told me the tale with Westerby openness. She was married in August and I was born in December. In the meantime, my father, a fighter pilot eight years her junior, was burned to death in his blazing Spitfire over Kent. It was on one of the last days of the Battle of Britain. Mormor and Swanny also, from time to time, told me the tale of the hasty marriage. Only Morfar had been enraged, disgusted, appalled (his words, apparently), and all for disowning his favourite child. Absurdly, he had threatened to take the doll’s house back. Padanaram, made for her, owned by no one but her, the child’s unique property, the errant woman was to forfeit.

  Socially one of the élite, my father had come down the scale a step or two in marrying Marie Westerby. His own father was a small Somerset squire and his mother an Honourable. But this pale grey pair, thin, gentle and unfailingly courteous, welcomed their son’s widow as if, instead of a waitress in the officers’ mess, she had been the daughter of some neighbouring landowner. Once a year we spent a week with them in their small manor house near Taunton. Away from them, I recalled only their low voices, an almost extravagant gentleness and an absent-mindedness, particularly marked in Grandpa Eastbrook, so apparent as to make me ask my mother if he was talking in his sleep.

  Very different were the grandparents who lived close at hand. East London was where they had come to in 1905 and, to use a phrase that would have meant nothing to them, ‘upwardly mobile’, they had moved northwards into a bigger and better house. The original Padanaram was the summit of their upward mobility in the area of home-buying. During the depression of the early thirties, when Morfar’s business failed, they were forced to move to a shabby double-fronted villa in a road off Crouch Hill, to be known in the family from its street number, as was the family’s way, always as ‘98’.

  It may be only hindsight, but now it seems to me that I always saw them as slightly disreputable. It must be hindsight when I say they were like hippies grown old, since in the fifties no hippie had yet come into being. Unlike my Eastbrook forebears, they weren’t stalwart reliable people, but retained into old age something childlike and capricious. Morfar was a violent old man, without wisdom, constantly looking back to regret lost opportunity and blaming everyone but himself for that loss.

  A tall and handsome figure, who always wore a beard (according to his wife, to hide a weak chin), he came regularly to our house on a Sunday afternoon for conversation with my mother’s ‘fiancé’. My mother had a number of these ‘fiancés’, in series of course, none of whom she married nor even perhaps had any intention of marrying. No doubt they were her lovers but if they were, she acted in their company with a quite uncharacteristic discretion and none of them ever stayed overnight. Morfar took a great fancy to one of them, whether the first or the second I don’t remember, and passed a good two hours of a Sunday telling this man the story of his life.

  His English never became good. It was fluent, of course, but grammatically appalling, each phrase studded with errors. Nine out of every ten words he mispronounced. He was especially bad with ultimate ‘d’s, ‘w’ sounds and the letter ‘b’, which in his rendering changed to ‘v’. Reading this, I see how merciless it looks, how unsympathetic towards an old man’s ineptitude, yet no one who had known Morfar could have seen him in that light. He was so self-assured, so confident of his general superiority to all, so insensitive, so certain of his linguistic mastery, that he would often boast of being equally proficient in Danish, English and German, to the extent of having to pause and think before he could be sure which language he was speaking.

  Seated in our living room, drinking sweet tea, he would inflict on my mother’s fiancé a stream of doleful or indignant reminiscence, sometimes growing heated and thumping a large gnarled fist on our coffee table. Everyone, it seemed, that he had ever been associated with in his business ventures had swindled him, a word frequently on his lips and rendered as ‘shvinded’. ‘It schoothe not have veen,’ was what he said when he meant something shouldn’t have happened, which was almost every transaction of his commercial life.

  Casual clothes were unknown to him, even the formal casual clothes of the period, sports jackets and flannel trousers. He always wore a suit, a shirt with a stiff white collar and a dark tie, in winter a grey trilby hat and in summer a straw boater. And he invariably arrived, in one of his ancient cars of course, the Morris 10 or the huge unwieldy Fiat, alone.

  He and Mormor seldom went anywhere together. Until I read the diaries I had only a distorted idea of what their married life must have been. They had stayed together, but most people did, however incompatible. Mormor sometimes said, with a harsh laugh, that she had to live in a big house ‘to get away from my husband’. Even to me, he was always referred to as her husband, never ‘Morfar’ or ‘your grandfather’ or ‘Rasmus’. ‘Ninety-eight’ was scarcely big enough to allow of this freedom, though there were four bedrooms. Looking back, it astonishes me that until he died they continued to share a bedroom and a bed.

  She went out on her own. When she came to us it was on her own. A small thin woman with elaborately coiffed white hair, she was the last person you would have thought of as a walker. But she walked, she always had, roving apparently purposelessly the streets near her home, stopping to stare at houses, peer over garden fences, sit on seats and mutter to herself, walk again. She dressed until she died at ninety-three in the fashions of the twenties, her prime and when she had been at her richest. Photographs of her in these clothes show a tweed coat by Chantal, a Lelong dress, a rubberized raincoat and flyer’s helmet by Schiaparelli. For a few years, Morfar had made money selling his Cadillacs and was not yet the prey of swindlers.

  But mostly I remember her in waistless black or dark-blue ‘frocks’ with embroidered insertions in their V-necks, high-heeled shoes with double instep straps. She went for her long walks in those shoes, grinding the heels down. For going out in the evenings and for funerals she had a black satin coat in a crossover style that fastened with a single jet button, and a pancake-shaped black satin hat. The first time I saw this hat was when she wore it in our house at a family gathering after Morfar was dead.

  Never one to beat about the bush, she came straight to the point.

  ‘Now I must decide which one of you three I am to live with.’

  She spoke as if such a decision must lie entirely with her. Had any widowed parent since Lear dared to put it so bluntly? Mormor was a reader but it was Dickens she read, not Shakespeare. She had Lear’s choice of making her home with one of three children, though one of them was male. John, Charles and I sat silent, possibly aware this was a momentous meeting.

  Swanny and my mother were no Goneril and Regan. Still, no one spoke. Mormor surveyed her son and her youngest daughter with that mild malice, tempered with amusement, a twitchy smile, that was so characteristic of her. I doubt if she had ever seriously thought of Ken’s large dark mansion flat near Baker Street as a possible home for herself, nor of the stout dull headmaster’s daughter he had married as a possible companion. But she would keep them on the hook for a few minutes longer, savouring Maureen’s efforts and her failure to look warm and sympathetic, before turning away and levelling her gaze on my mother.

  ‘I shouldn’t take up much room, Marie.’

  While almost everyone who knew my mother had anglicized her name into Mari or gallicized it into Maree, Mormor and Swanny continued to pronounce it in the Danish way, roughly as Maria with the ‘r’ coming from the throat. As she spoke, Mormor seemed to swallow her ‘r’ even more than usual.

  My mother said, rather feebly, that we really didn’t have any room, and it was true that our house was small. But we had three bedrooms and if some solution could have been found to the problem of where to put Padanaram, the third could have accommodated Mormor. My mother and I lived on the income my father ha
d left her, having inherited from his own grandmother the capital it derived from, plus her widow’s pension and the considerable allowance my Eastbrook grandfather made her, an allowance which continued under his will. We were quite well-off.

  Both she and Swanny would have thought it demeaning for a married woman or a widow to work, an almost direct reversal of the attitude prevailing today. I never heard my mother mention the possibility of taking a job. She had no hobbies, no apparent interests beyond reading women’s magazines and light popular fiction. She kept our house clean and cooked very nicely. As far as I know she was serenely happy. She looked it. She was even-tempered, sweet, pretty and kind. I never once saw her in tears. A large part of her time she spent in caring for her clothes and looking after her appearance. Shopping she enjoyed and going to the hairdresser. After I came home from school she would change her clothes, do her hair and make up her face in the heavy elaborate way that was then fashionable, and one of the fiancés would come or else we would go out, usually to the cinema. For years we went to the pictures twice a week.

  What did she and the fiancé do? Talk, as far as I know, sometimes put on a record and dance. I never saw a kiss or a touch, apart from the dancing. Two of them had cars and would take us out for drives. I was always included in these trips and on long Saturday or Sunday outings, but once a week, until I was old enough to be left by myself, my mother would go out alone and Swanny would come to be with me. I have since supposed that it was on these occasions that she and the current fiancé went somewhere to make love, but I may be wrong.

  Into this pleasant innocent existence my mother had no intention of allowing Mormor to intrude. I remembered how, when I had inquired about the doll’s house, Swanny had said simply that Mormor loved her best. And perhaps we all understood, within moments of her selection beginning, that it was to be Swanny with whom Mormor would choose to live until she died.

  But she wasn’t prepared to put the rest of us out of our suspense just yet. When she wanted to use an endearment to her daughters or to me she would prefix our names with the adjective lille. In Danish this of course means ‘little’, but it can carry in its sense far more than the English word, a suggestion of ‘dear’, of affection, of tenderness. Swanny received it most often – ‘lille Swanny’. Now it was my mother’s turn, a fairly rare instance.

  ‘I could have your guest room, lille Marie. You could put that old doll’s house in your garage.’

  ‘You’d have to ask Ann about that. It’s hers, remember.’

  ‘What does a big girl of fourteen want with a baby’s toy?’ said Mormor rather grandly. Her bright blue eyes, a hard, almost ugly turquoise blue, snapped with their kingfisher flash. She proceeded to shock everyone, as she always could. ‘My husband’s dead. He won’t get to know about it where he’s gone to.’

  A month later she moved in with Swanny and Torben. But first she put ‘98’ on the market and sold it within days. If she had ever had the chance she would probably have turned out to be much better at business than Morfar. No one would have ‘schvinded’ her. She drove a hard bargain and, refusing offers, stuck out for the £5,000 she had asked for the house. Today it would fetch forty times that but it was a good price in 1954.

  The four-poster that had possibly belonged to Pauline Bonaparte was one of only two pieces of any size she kept and took with her to Hampstead. There had been valuable furniture, for Mormor’s own father had owned property in Copenhagen and when his tenants defaulted on the rent he took their tables and chairs from them in lieu of the money. Quite a lot of this Morfar had managed to get his hands on. But everything went and, apart from the bed, a big black carved table and her ancient couturier-designed clothes, all Mormor took with her were her albums of photographs, her complete works of Dickens in Danish translation, and the notebooks, by then forty-nine of them, in which she had been writing down her life since she was a young girl.

  Now that the diaries have been published, now that Asta and its sequels are bestsellers and it is fashionable to say how wonderful they are or what rubbish they are, it seems strange that none of us was in the least interested in what Mormor wrote or had even noticed that she wrote anything particular at all.

  Open about matters most women of her age are anxious to keep dark, she was secretive about that one thing. When she was writing and someone came into the room, the notebook was quickly slipped away. Sometimes, I believe, she sat on it. So when I say that the notebooks arrived along with the bed, the complete works of Dickens and the photograph albums when Mormor moved in with Swanny, I don’t mean that any sort of parade of them was made. I only know that they must have arrived with her because Swanny found them when Mormor died nearly twenty years later.

  The fashion for ‘granny annexes’ had hardly arrived in the fifties. Swanny’s house was quite large, big enough for a flat to have been contrived in it, but Mormor lived en famille with her daughter and son-in-law. They had no children and she was with them as much as if she were their child. That is, I think, she was with them when it suited her. She ate all her meals with them, sat with them in the evenings and was determined always to be there when they entertained. But she never went out with Swanny, she never came to us at the same time as Swanny came. She went out alone or, as often as not, with Uncle Harry, and was gone for hours, just as she spent long hours alone upstairs.

  Mormor was a very old woman by this time and it was inevitable she repeated herself. The interesting thing was how seldom she did so when telling her stories. Some, of course, had passed into a family mythology, the one about her own parents’ maid Karoline from Jutland, for instance, and the one about the drunk but otherwise puritanical uncle who disapproved of Morfar’s brother being divorced and threw a bottle at him in a bar in Nyhavn. But she was always coming out with new ones. She could always surprise us.

  My mother and I were with her in Swanny’s house when she recounted one none of us had heard before. Mormor had been living there for about a year by then and her seventy-fifth birthday wasn’t far off. Out of courtesy to me, for my Danish was never good, she spoke in English, a heavily accented, drawled English, though immeasurably better than Morfar’s had been.

  ‘My husband married me to get my dowry. Oh, yes. Not very nice to think of, is it? But I’m used to it, I have had to live with it.’

  She didn’t look as if it particularly distressed her. She looked as she habitually did, astute, calculating, rather pleased with herself.

  ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of that,’ Swanny said.

  ‘No, well, I haven’t told you everything. Some things I have kept back.’ She gave me one of her hard, intense smiles. Age had not made her face sag but tightened it so that there was not much flesh left, only a mask of bones and deeply lined skin with those bright harsh blue eyes staring out of it. ‘It’s good for old people to have some new things left to tell. Otherwise they might become very boring to their poor children.’

  My mother asked, what dowry?

  ‘Five thousand kroner,’ said Mormor, rather triumphantly, I thought.

  ‘It doesn’t seem much.’ It was about £250.

  ‘Not to you perhaps, lille Swanny, you with your rich husband and lovely house. It was a lot to him. He came to Copenhagen and heard about old Kastrup’s daughter who would have 5,000 kroner when she married and the next thing he was coming round to our house and making eyes at lille Asta.’

  It sounded like something out of Ibsen. Mormor’s utterances often did. It also sounded fairly unlikely. I could see from their expressions that neither Swanny nor my mother believed a word of it. Mormor shrugged her shoulders, levelled her blue gaze at each of us in turn in the way she had.

  ‘What did I know? He was tall, he was good-looking. He had a weak chin but he wore that brown beard to cover it up.’ Something made her laugh. She laughed harshly. ‘He was a clever engineer, he could make anything, everyone said. He could make a silly girl fall in love with him. For a little while.’

  It wasn�
��t much of a revelation after all. Much of it was probably in her imagination. It seemed unlikely to me that any man would marry a girl for the sake of £250. I thought the story on a par with one we had heard before and which she now proceeded to re-tell, about how when she was pregnant for the first time, she thought the baby would come out through her navel.

  ‘Imagine my surprise when he was born the usual way.’

  All this is in the diaries of course, but we knew nothing of that then. It saddens me sometimes to think that my mother never knew, that she died before the diaries were found. Some of Asta’s stories could be disproved. The anecdote about Hansine, asking as she cleared the dinner table when guests were present, ‘Are we gentlefolk or do we stack?’, I later found out had originated in a Punch cartoon from the twenties or thirties. The birth of Mogens coming as a surprise to his mother was perhaps another fantasy that had found its way into her mythology. A lot of her stories were funny, some bizarre or grotesque. The biggest one from her past she might never have told but for a malicious intervention, and then she did no more than put up a kind of defence.

  It was good for old people to have something left to tell, as Mormor herself had said, for otherwise they might become boring to their poor children.

  4

  August 30th, 1905

  IGAAR VAR DER SOLFORMØRKELSE. Vi havde fortalt Drengene at det vilde blive mørkt—Lærerne giver dem ikke altid de rigtige Oplysninger – saa de var meget skuffede over at det var bare Tusmørke og at det ikke varede længe.

  Yesterday there was an eclipse of the sun. The boys had been told it would get dark—these teachers don’t always give accurate information—and were very disappointed when it only became twilight and that not for very long.

  Things are getting worse in Russia and now they are having riots against the Jews. There is cholera in Berlin. I haven’t heard from my husband since he sent the money and that was before Swanhild was born. But I don’t care. We’re all right on our own, the boys and the baby and Hansine and me. In fact we’re a lot better without him and but for the money, which we’ll soon need, I’d as soon he never came back.