Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Rasmus’s birthday tomorrow. I meant to pretend I’d forgotten but now all is well I shall give him his present after all. Fancy giving a husband a present because he hasn’t made you enceinte!

  5

  ONE OF MORMOR’S favourite stories was of Swanny’s courtship. She called it a romance and talked about it with great pride, for, though both her daughters had made what she called ‘good marriages’, my father had spoilt my mother’s by dying young.

  In spite of speaking Danish like natives, neither Swanny nor my mother went to Denmark until they were grown up. Swanny, at nineteen, had never got over the death of her favourite brother in the First World War. Mormor sent her to stay with her own cousins, the Holbechs, the son and daughter-in-law of her Aunt Frederikke, in Copenhagen. This was Padanaram time, when they were living in some style, and there was money.

  As in the song, Torben Kjær saw a stranger across a crowded room. He was a young diplomat, home on leave from a posting in South America where he was second secretary. Swanny was a bridesmaid at the wedding of a girl called Dorte and Torben was one of the guests. Apparently, he fell in love with her at first sight. He asked her to marry him two days later and accompany him back to wherever it was, Quito or Asunción.

  Mormor would tell this story to anyone who happened to be there and was willing to listen. She told it in front of Swanny and Torben, by then a distinguished-looking grey-haired attaché at the Danish Embassy. He remained impassive, trained to show nothing much. All those years ago, a blue-eyed blond boy of twenty-two, he had returned alone to Ecuador or wherever it was because Swanny had been too astounded by his proposal to take it seriously and didn’t want to go to South America anyway.

  ‘But he never forgot my daughter Swanhild,’ Mormor would say, ‘and for years he wrote her these wonderful love letters which I know are wonderful, though of course I have never seen them. One doesn’t show such letters to one’s mother. When he came to a post here they were married. Imagine it, ten years had passed, but to him he said it was no more than a day. What a romance!’

  Looking at Torben and Swanny now, one could hardly believe it. They were both so suave, so calm, so well-dressed, so middle-aged. My mother, though only six years younger, was like a child beside dignified Swanny. There was no resemblance between them and none between Swanny and Uncle Ken or Swanny and Mormor. Still, they were a family of disparate appearance, none looked very much like any of the others. My mother was much prettier than her mother, though of the same sort of build. Ken looked a bit like one of the uncles in the old photographs, short and burly but with rather handsome pointed features, and his younger son is like him though much taller. They all had reddish or dark-brown hair and eyes ranging from cat’s green to a bright blue, they all were inclined to freckles and sunburn.

  But Swanny—Swanny was the perfect Danish type. Or the Nordic type, perhaps I should say. She was taller than any of them, even Morfar, and she was a dazzling blonde. In sunshine she went brown, not freckled. Her eyes were a dark sea-blue. Even in the days I’m talking about, Willow Road in its heyday, Hampstead in the sixties, when she was in her late fifties, she still had that look of a goddess out of Wagner, with hair silver instead of gold and a profile like an empress on an ancient coin.

  She and Torben gave a lot of parties. I didn’t know and still don’t if he was obliged to give them as a diplomat or if they just liked parties. A bit of both, I expect. I used to go to them, or some of them, because I was at college just over the hill, and because there was a man who was one of Torben’s assistants, and was always roped in to help with drinks and conversation, that I was keen on. Later on he became keen on me too but that is another story.

  Mormor loved those parties. My mother, who occasionally came with the current fiancé, used to say to me she expected Swanny and Torben would have preferred Mormor to keep out of it, to stay in her own room or at least leave early, but didn’t know how to tell her without hurting her feelings. For ‘hurting her feelings’ I privately substituted ‘making her furious’, as I never saw Mormor as vulnerable or sensitive. After all, she wasn’t the usual old granny, infirm and bumbling, sitting in the corner and complaining about her ailments to anyone who would listen. I think, if they were wise and they were, they saw her as an attraction, a star turn. Some of those people came to their parties because they knew Swanny’s mother would be there and Swanny’s mother was fun.

  I’ve since thought how they must look back, remembering it was Asta Westerby of Asta they met in the house in Willow Road and who told them those stories, many of which appeared in the diaries. If they had known would they have paid more attention, been more polite, more deferential? Perhaps not. I never saw signs of Mormor being neglected. It was rather the reverse. She was always one of an animated group and it seemed to me she always dominated it.

  Why didn’t she get tired, like old ladies of eighty are supposed to? Why did she never say at nine o’clock that she must be off to bed? She never mentioned tiredness, never seemed to flag. An enormous energy possessed her. She was tiny, her body too small for her rather large head. I suppose her body had shrunk and her head hadn’t. Her face, by then only a little less white than her hair, was copiously powdered but otherwise without make-up. She smelt strongly of Coty’s L’Aimant as if her clothes were steeped in it. She often wore one of those brooches that must make conservationists wince, a piece of blue butterfly’s wing mounted in mica and gold. It brought out the colour of her eyes, which were the same sort of blue, but in fact it needed no bringing out, being sharp and brilliant enough, and the combination of eyes and brooch, instead of flattering, was somehow embarrassing.

  A curious thing about her was that she never sat down. Of course she must have sat down and if I think specifically about occasions when we were together I can place her in a certain chair at a certain time, but still my overall memory of her is that she was always on her feet or else reclining as in the picture of Mme Recamier. Certainly, at those parties she stood the whole time. People knew better than to offer her a chair.

  ‘Why? Are you tired of standing up talking to me?’ she said sharply to some hapless young man who was new there.

  To the Danes among the company she spoke Danish. It was by then as heavily accented as her English was, one of these people told me. Her accent gave a curious piquancy to the stories she told, at least to my ears. Although I’ve read most of them in the diaries since then, she seldom repeated herself in reality. Before I read it I only once heard the story about Karoline, the girl who peed in the street, and only once the story about the big dinner party in Copenhagen in the twenties at which she and Morfar were the one couple who had never been divorced.

  It was at a Willow Road party that I heard her tell the one about her cousin accidentally killing her lover with poisonous fungi and on that same occasion the one about some relative going to an orphanage in Odense to pick out a child for adoption. This story has some relevance to what happened later. I suppose I ought to say now that I never knew how much of these stories was true and how much exaggeration and embroidery. Mormor, as I’ve said, was a true novelist, only her novels were the diaries she wrote over a period of sixty years. I don’t really know it but I’d guess that the truth with its disappointing complexities and its failed dramas, the sort of damp squib properties it often has, dissatisfied her. She made it better. She gave it a beginning, a middle and an end. With her it always had a climax.

  Mormor had no brothers or sisters. This was supposed to have happened to a wealthy cousin, one of the Swedish lot. The woman was happily married but childless and eventually she and her husband decided to adopt, a simple enough business at that time. According to Mormor, you picked the child you wanted and took it home with you.

  Sigrid’s husband took her to an orphanage in Odense on the island of Fyn, native place of Mormor’s mother’s favourite Hans Andersen. (Mormor digressed here to say how she hated Andersen and give a reminder to her audience that he was, nevertheless, ‘the
world’s greatest children’s writer’.) The submissive Sigrid was led by a matron to a particular child, a little boy whose beauty and pretty ways immediately won her heart. He was about a year old, according to Mormor.

  ‘My cousin loved him at once,’ she said. ‘She took him home with her and they adopted him and then the husband told her the truth. This was his child by another woman, a girl he had met on business trips to Odense.’ She added, with relish, ‘His mistress.’ It was a word which, to her, carried many undertones of glamour and vice. ‘He had arranged the whole thing. Sigrid forgave him and kept the boy and he must be quite an old man by now.’ Here Mormor fixed a fierce and brilliant blue eye on one of the men in her audience. ‘I wouldn’t have. The very idea! That boy would have gone straight back to where he came from.’

  Of course a discussion ensued on the ethics of all this and people said what they would have done in Sigrid’s position and her husband’s position.

  ‘You might have loved him by then,’ a woman suggested.

  ‘I wouldn’t have,’ Mormor said. ‘Knowing whose he was and how I’d been deceived would have finished that.’ And then, devastatingly, ‘I don’t love people easily.’ Her eyes roved the faces, the distant reaches of the room. ‘Most of this talk of love is bosh!’

  It was one of her favourite words. Sentimentality and tenderness, sensitivity and diffidence, it was all bosh. Drama was what she liked, vitality and power. Many of her stories featured violent death. After the great market crash of 1929 another cousin, the brother of this Sigrid, had shot himself, leaving his widow and four children bereft. A distant relative emigrated to the United States in the 1880s and never knew until he was an old man returned to Denmark that the house he had lived in with his wife and children in Chicago on North Clark Street, was next door to the site of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Mormor, by day, wandered Hampstead and the Heath. She walked up and down Heath Street and in and out of the shops, ‘just looking’. She talked to people and what they said to her she put in her diaries, but she made no friends. Hers was the journalist’s way of being in touch with others. She interviewed them. My mother told me she had no women friends, she could never remember her mother having a single close ‘chum’. Morfar had his old business associates from the distant Chelsea days and Mormor knew their wives. She had acquaintances among the neighbours at Padanaram and at ‘98’. There was only one person who called her by her Christian name and whom she called by his and that was Harry Duke.

  Like so much associated with Mormor, he was something of a surprise. Though I seldom saw him, I’d known of him since I was born and accepted him as I accepted members of the family. He was Uncle Harry to me, as he was to my mother, to Swanny and for all I can tell to Uncle Ken too. Most of what I know of him I know from my mother. He had retired in 1948 but before that he’d been a clerk with Thames Water, or the Metropolitan Water Board as it was then called. His home was in Leyton. He liked watching Leyton Orient playing at home and going to dog racing, but he was a reader too and fond of the theatre. Mormor was a snob but not where Uncle Harry was concerned. No one was allowed to say a word against him in her hearing.

  He took her to the dogs once, though she drew the line at football matches. His wife died a few years before Morfar and after that Swanny and my mother called him ‘Mor’s boyfriend’. He was kind and nice, not commonplace but sharp and funny, and he adored Mormor. They drove about in his car, went to museums and exhibitions together and shared large meals. They both loved eating and drinking. Harry Duke was a fine-looking, tall and handsome man who still had his own teeth and most of his hair the last time I saw him, which was at Morfar’s funeral. There was one far more remarkable thing about him and that was that he had the VC. He had won it in the First World War for rescuing, among others of the wounded and dying in no man’s land, Private ‘Jack’ Westerby.

  Compared with him, Hansine, who had been their maid-of-all-work and household slave until she married in 1920, remained a mere acquaintance. Hansine died the same year as Morfar, and Mormor apparently had no contact at all with her daughter. Swanny told me she and Torben wanted Hansine and her husband Samuel Cropper invited to Mormor and Morfar’s Golden Wedding party in 1947 but Mormor wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘If I asked her,’ she said incredibly, ‘it would be to help out but the caterers are going to see to all that.’

  Swanny said she seemed almost glad when Hansine died seven years later. It was a kind of relief. Perhaps only because here was someone else who might be a nuisance out of the way, someone else to cross off the slate. Weeks went by without her even seeing Harry or speaking to him on the phone. Mormor was almost chillingly self-sufficient. This changed very little as she grew older. One day, in Swanny’s house, she told me she hadn’t cried since she was twenty-three and her baby, the one called Mads, died when he was a month old. It was another of her stories, but not one to be told in public. They expected his death and she was with him when he died, sitting by the side of his cot, holding him in her arms. This was in a house they had in Hortensiavej in Copenhagen. She came downstairs to where Morfar was, told him the baby was dead and began to cry. He stared at her for a while and then left the room. She resolved after that that she would never cry again and she never did, not even in solitude, not even when the telegram came to tell her Mogens had been killed.

  On the other hand, she laughed a good deal, a harsh tinkly laugh, or a wise knowing one, or a dry giggle. She might laugh at other people’s discomfiture but she also did so at her own. It was one of the endearing things about her. She even uttered that harsh cackle after she had told me the story of Mads’s death and her own unregarded tears. I would have thought her the soul of discretion, capable of any restraints, with no longer any need to confide, if she had ever had such a need, her past and her emotions under an iron control. Mischief I knew her to be capable of but not malice. She may have taken advantage of Swanny’s love for her and her unselfishness, but she loved her dearly and was inordinately proud of her.

  If she had belonged in a later generation her pride would have been prompted by different things. Because she was born in 1880 she was destined to be proud of a son for his prowess as a soldier or his professional success, of a daughter for her beauty and social achievements. If one of her daughters had become Mistress of Girton or a DBE but hadn’t married, I think Asta would have been rather ashamed of her. As it was, Swanny was all she dreamed of and more. Swanny getting her photograph in the Tatler marked the culmination of Asta’s social ambitions. When she showed the copy of the magazine to Uncle Harry, Swanny said, she swelled with pride so that with her rather large head and spindly legs she had the look of a cocky little pigeon.

  The photograph in question had been taken while the Queen of Denmark (or it may have been the King of Denmark and his Queen) were on a state visit to London and posed with some of the Embassy staff at a dinner party. Torben was looking very grand and aristocratic in a white tie and tails and Swanny magnificent in a long pale lacy gown with strings of pearls around her neck. Their names were in the caption underneath along with the royals and the ambassador and a Danish woman historian who was being given some sort of honour.

  I believe, and always have, that this picture was the cause of all Swanny’s subsequent troubles. Swanny wouldn’t have it and nor would my mother but why else had the writer of the letter waited so long before imparting his or her piece of news? Surely it would be too great a coincidence for the only photograph of Swanny that had ever appeared in a national magazine to be there one week and the letter to arrive the next?

  Either the photograph sparked off a sudden explosion of envy and resentment in the letter writer or else it was the final straw in a back-breaking load of lifelong bitterness. I inclined towards the latter view. I felt very strongly that whoever it was had kept an eye and an ear on Swanny from a distance for years, learning from various sources the progress of her life, perhaps coming once or twice to Willow Road to look a
t her house and even watch its handsome chatelaine come and go. The picture in the Tatler pressed a button that signalled: now is the time, write now!

  It was the day of a luncheon party, all women. Two women came in to cook and another to wait at table, so Swanny had very little to do, but for some reason it was quite late in the morning before she opened her post.

  Mormor had already come down, had her coffee and gone into the kitchen to see what food was being prepared. Always fond of her food, she remained essentially faithful to Danish cuisine. Nothing in her estimation quite came up to pork with red cabbage, roast goose, fruit soups, sildesalat and Krustader, though she was fond too of a hearty steak and kidney pudding. If the meal Swanny had ordered for the ten visiting ladies hadn’t included some item of smoked fish or meat she wouldn’t have been pleased and she’d have said so, at the table as likely as not.

  Swanny never used Torben’s study in those days. It was his, it was sacrosanct. She took her letters upstairs and opened them in her bedroom where she had a small escritoire. It was something she often did, as much as anything to be away from Mormor’s devouring curiosity. (‘Who’s that from, lille Swanny? I know that writing. Is that a Danish stamp I see?’) This time Mormor was safely out of the way, lifting saucepan lids and sniffing smoked salmon. Swanny told my mother and me that the letter was the last she opened. Her name and address were printed and she didn’t much like the look of any of it. What she expected was a request for money, a begging letter. She and Torben occasionally had those.

  When she had read it she said she grew hot all over. She could see her face in the mirror and it had turned dark red. She felt as if she was suffocating. One of the windows was open and she put her head out and breathed deeply. Then she read it again.