by Ruth Rendell
Before she could stop her, Asta had picked up a lighter and set fire to the pieces in an ashtray. She looked defiantly at Swanny and brushed her hands against each other as if the paper had laid a coating of dust on them.
‘Oh, this is so silly, Swanny. At your age! Don’t you know what to do with anonymous letters? You burn them. Everyone knows that.’
‘Why did you burn it? How could you?’
‘Because burning is the best thing for it.’
‘How could you, how could you?’
Mormor wasn’t in the least embarrassed. She wasn’t upset or remorseful. Swanny said she had the curious feeling that her mother had no emotions left, they were all used up, nothing mattered any more except the things you suppose old women don’t care about: having a good time, dressing up, eating and drinking, having a man friend to go about with.
She made one of those dismissive gestures of hers, a turning of her head one way, a wave of her hand in the opposite direction, the implication that this was all too trivial, too time-wasting. Swanny hadn’t touched her coffee but Asta drank hers. She could always drink coffee and tea scalding hot, though one of her favourite stories was about some relation who had burnt a hole in his oesophagus doing just that.
‘Mother,’ said Swanny, ‘you must tell me. Is it true?’
‘I don’t know why you mind so much. Haven’t I been a good mother to you? Haven’t I loved you best? Aren’t I here with you now? What’s wrong with you, digging up what’s all past and gone?’
Of course Swanny asked her again and this time, she said, a cunning look passed across her mother’s face. It was just the same as the look Asta put on when lying to them as children. They always knew. In the evening when she and their father appeared all dressed-up: ‘Are you going out?’ ‘Of course not. Why would I go out?’ Or when their parents embarked upon a particularly vicious quarrel, with insults and reproaches flying: ‘Do you really wish you hadn’t married Far?’ ‘Don’t be silly, of course not.’
‘Of course it isn’t true, lille Swanny.’
‘Then why? I mean, why did someone write it?’
‘Am I God? Am I a psychiatrist? How should I know why mad people do what they do. You should be thankful someone here has a little sense and knows that the right thing is to burn dirty evil letters. You should appreciate your good mother who cares for you.’
Asta was going out. She had had her coffee, brought her hat downstairs with her and now she was going out. She never said where she was going or when she’d be back. While she was out she would buy some cards to send for her chocolate party.
Left alone, Swanny told herself she must believe. Believe and forget. Of the existence of the diaries she had no idea at that time. They were just books Mor had brought with her. More photograph albums, she thought, if she thought about them at all. Had she known, she told me years later, she’d have gone through the lot that day while Asta was out. I must believe, she said aloud in that empty room, talking to the flowers and the coffee cups.
Asta wasn’t like an old woman, not like an old mother with her daughter, instead, Swanny was the mother and Asta her adolescent daughter whom she suspected of some terrible act the girl had no intention of admitting. The girl, as a girl might be in such a situation, was in control. Swanny was powerless.
That evening, in front of Torben, after dinner but still at the table, Asta announced that she had something to tell them. She might be going to die. It might happen quite soon. In the nature of things she couldn’t live long, but as it happened she suspected she had cancer.
They were all concern, all sympathy and inquiry. As it turned out, the tests subsequently done on Asta were negative, she didn’t have cancer, there was nothing wrong with her. Perhaps she suspected there was, perhaps on the other hand it was all done for effect, because she so much enjoyed making dramas. But that evening she went up to bed early for her and asked Swanny to come to her bedroom when she was undressed.
This was a most unusual, an unprecedented, request. Swanny expected when she got there to have symptoms recounted which her mother might think unfit for Torben’s ears, though it would have been unlike Asta to have such qualms. Instead, she told her what she had prevaricated about that morning. She had always meant to tell Swanny before she died. To die with something like that on her conscience wouldn’t be right.
She didn’t look guilty, Swanny said, she looked pleased with herself. She wasn’t in bed but sitting by the bed, wrapped in a bright kingfisher-blue silk robe Uncle Ken’s wife had given her for Christmas and which Swanny never remembered seeing her wear before, she had said so vehemently how she disliked it. Her eyes were like buttons covered with the same material.
‘You may as well know it all,’ she said. ‘You’re not mine. I mean, I didn’t give birth to you. I adopted you when you were a few days old.’
It took a while for the shock to strike. It always does. Perhaps it was because Swanny was stunned that she could speak, and speak calmly.
‘Like the people in that story of yours?’ she said. ‘The one about the couple who went to the orphanage in Odense. Was that you and Far?’
Asta didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’
Even then Swanny knew of course that it couldn’t have been. The dates were wrong. Her mother was living in London when she was born, she was born there, it was on her birth certificate, while her father was somewhere in Denmark. But she wanted so desperately to believe. This way, though he had never loved her, she could have Rasmus Westerby for her father.
‘Why didn’t you tell me when I was young?’
Asta shrugged. ‘You were mine. I thought of you as mine. I forgot you were someone else’s.’
‘Was Far my father?’
‘There wasn’t much to be said for my husband, lille Swanny, but he wouldn’t have betrayed his own wife. He wasn’t as bad as that. I’m surprised you can suggest it.’
Swanny said she screamed. She screamed out and covered her mouth. ‘You’re surprised! You’re surprised! You tell me these things and you’re surprised at what I say.’
Asta was quite cool and calm. ‘Of course I’m surprised when you speak like that to your mother.’
‘You’re not my mother, you’ve just said so. Is it true?’
Again that strange look, Swanny said, an indifferent smile, a half-acknowledgement of naughtiness committed. Anyone who knew Asta recognized it at once from her description.
‘Am I a criminal, lille Swanny? Are you a policeman?’
Swanny said, like the child she had been at the time, ‘He didn’t make the doll’s house for me.’
‘You’re just a big baby. Come and give me a kiss.’
She beckoned, she lifted her cheek. Swanny said she felt like taking hold of this little old woman and shaking her, seizing her by the throat, torturing the truth out of her—tell me, tell me. She kissed her meekly and went away to cry.
Torben found her crying in their bedroom and he took her in his arms to comfort her. He thought she was crying because her mother hadn’t long to live. But Asta wasn’t dying. She would live another eleven years.
7
HOW THOSE ELEVEN YEARS passed, in that particular aspect of them, she told me in that time when we became close, after my mother was dead. I mean, of course, that she didn’t tell me everything, for no one ever does, but she told me what she chose I should know.
After that first confrontation with Asta over the coffee cups, after the second that night in Asta’s room, it was a long while before she said anything to Torben. My mother was her confidante but forbidden, for the time being, to discuss any of it with Asta herself. So why was Torben kept in the dark? Everyone said theirs was a good marriage, they seemed devoted to each other, inseparable. The story of his long ardent courtship was well-known. It was possible when with them to see the occasional conspiratorial glance which passed from him to her, the half-smile she gave him covertly in return. At home they spoke Danish together, their private language, their personal c
ode. But she didn’t tell him what her mother had confessed to her.
When my mother saw her she was often distraught, with dark rings round her eyes from lack of sleep. She even got tranquillizers from the doctor. Didn’t Torben see? Didn’t he notice these changes? Or did she lie to him and attribute these effects to some other cause?
After he was dead and Asta was dead she told me she was afraid of what he would think of her. Apparently his family was upper class, he may even have been a scion of a minor aristocracy. Imagine being afraid her own husband might despise her for possibly lowly origins after thirty years of marriage! The worst thing, she said, was not knowing who she was, for by then, by the time she told him, she had made her mother state categorically that she was no more Rasmus’s child than she was Asta’s. Hadn’t Asta herself said, when telling the tale of the orphanage, that if she’d been the finally enlightened wife she wouldn’t have kept the boy but ‘sent him straight back where he came from’?
That his wife had received an anonymous letter shocked Torben. The fact of its being an anonymous letter seems to have angered him more than its contents. Of course he had never seen it.
‘Mother burnt it.’
‘You mean Mother imagined it.’
‘No, I got it, it was sent to me and when I let Mother read it she burnt it.’
Torben dismissed the whole thing as nonsense. I don’t mean he did this peremptorily, he wasn’t that sort of man, but after listening attentively and by then doubtless seeing how distraught it was making her, after considering it and thinking about it, he told her his conclusion was that her mother had made it up.
‘But the letter, Torben.’
‘Ah, yes, that wonderful letter.’
It was a dry look he gave her. He smiled ruefully, he cast up his eyes a very little. She said she knew what he meant, what he was thinking but would never say. She could tell who he thought had sent the letter. He put it all reasonably. Asta was old, Asta was senile. Now, certainly in the last decade of her life, she looked back on a dull existence and wished to invest it with an excitement it had never had. So that she might feel she hadn’t wasted it, so that she could show she had lived. She projected her secret desires on to a life gone by that no one now alive could prove had been different.
The next thing, he said, she would be saying Swanny was her child but not Rasmus’s, hers by a lover. There was a certain kind of woman who did this, it was a well-known fact. Curiously, this did comfort Swanny for a while. She even said to my mother that she wished she’d been sensible and told Torben long before.
However, Asta never did say Swanny was her child by a lover. Torben had perhaps overlooked the fact that she belonged in a generation to whom a married woman’s having a lover wasn’t only unethical, but almost criminal. The diaries show plainly enough what she thought of women who ‘sinned’ in this way and what she thought a woman’s ‘honour’ was. By this time, anyway, she had managed to put the whole business of Swanny’s origins into the past, to bury it. Impatient with discussing it, bored and irritated by it, she made it plain to Swanny that this was the last thing she ever wanted to talk about again.
‘Let’s forget it, lille Swanny,’ was her most frequent rejoinder to Swanny’s reiterated questions, or, with exasperation, ‘What a lot of bosh it all is!’
In those years that went by after her confession, she simply dismissed the whole subject as fast as she could. What relevance did something which happened sixty years before have today?
‘I love you, I chose you, you’ve had a good life and you’ve got a good husband’—Asta couldn’t resist adding that this was more than she had had ‘—and you’re comfortable, you want for nothing, so what’s wrong with you, going on like this?’
‘I’ve a right to know who I really am, Mother.’
‘I’ve told you. We adopted you, your father and I. We wanted a girl because we only had boys until Marie came along. We picked you out in an orphanage—there, does that satisfy you? I don’t know what’s the matter with you, lille Swanny, I’m the one who should be moaning, I’m the one who lost those babies, one dying after another—but do I complain? Never! I make the best of things, I get through.’
You have to understand that Swanny now found herself quite alone. She told me that she felt an outcast in many ways. Her mother, for all her vaunted love, was no longer her mother, had never been her mother. Her sister and brother were not her sister and brother but only the people she had been brought up with. It struck her forcibly at about this time, a year or so after the disclosure, that she was most likely not even Danish. Her Danishness had been important to her in ways she hadn’t fully appreciated until it had been shown not to exist. For a while a curious thing happened and Danish, her cradle tongue, grew stiff on her lips and when she spoke it she felt like an impostor, uttering a language to which she had no right. She had no language, for she had no nationality. And all this was compounded by the ridiculousness of it at her age. What had happened to her, though inevitably an evil, more suitably happened to children or adolescents.
One of the worst things was that her husband, who had always been her support, a rock that she could cling to, was no comfort to her here because he simply refused to take it seriously. He wasn’t irritable but he was incredulous. Many times he told her that it was beyond him, an intelligent sensible woman like herself, swallowing any amount of nonsense her senile mother chose to tell her. For his part, he had never believed it, had never doubted, and he claimed to be able to see strong resemblances between his wife and various personages in Mormor’s photographs of ancestors.
Then why had Mor said it? She got it out of Dickens, Torben said, with some triumph at finding this ingenious solution. It was true that Mormor seldom read anything but Dickens and read him all the time, true too that children turning out not to be who and whose they seem figure prominently in his plots. Look at Estella, look at Esther Summerson, said Torben, himself no mean reader. Asta was senile and she confused fiction with reality, fantasy with fact. Swanny realized something she had never noticed before, that Torben disliked her mother.
Asta’s cancer was something she had imagined or invented or thought up as a useful ploy. For a woman of her advanced age, she was exceptionally strong and healthy. It was my mother who had cancer and died of it.
She had been going to be married. I don’t mean simply that she was engaged, she had been engaged several times, but this time it was serious, George the last fiancé was serious, and they were to be married in Hampstead registry office in August. The cancer she had is called carcinomatosis, a kind of total malignancy that consumes the sufferer very swiftly. She was dead three weeks after diagnosis.
The funeral was at Golders Green and Asta came. Swanny discouraged her but she came, dressed in her funerary uniform, the crossover black silk coat and the pancake hat. After the service, as we were looking at the wreaths laid out in the crematorium garden, she made, very loudly and clearly, one of her devastating remarks.
‘My children are always dying.’
It was true. First the baby Mads, then, presumably, the baby Swanny had replaced, Mogens on the Somme, now her daughter Marie. Since Swanny was not hers, Knud, my Uncle Ken, was the only living child that remained to her.
Swanny said faintly, ‘Oh, Mor …’
‘It’s not so bad as it used to be, I can tell you. You get hard when you get old, these things don’t mean very much. I’ve no feeling left.’ And Asta, to everyone’s shocked astonishment, picked up a large bouquet of roses from the ground, sniffed them and removed the card attached to their stems. ‘I think I’ll take these home, lille Swanny. I like red roses. You often forget to put flowers in my room.’
She did take them home, remarking that they were no use to Marie now and that it would have been better if Peter and Sheila (whoever they were) had given her flowers while she was alive.
I went back to Swanny’s house with George and his son Daniel, a very handsome, rather quiet man of about my ow
n age, who was a psychiatrist. These days Swanny could have had counselling for her problems of identity and loss but not in the 1960s. Even to go to a psychiatrist seemed a daring step to take. But it crossed my mind to suggest this to him as we arrived in Willow Road. He seemed pleasant, not watchful of one’s every move as they sometimes are, not superior or remote.
At the funeral he had asked me who Asta was and shown interest in her in a rather unusual way. He spoke the way men do when admiring some beautiful young woman they want to know better.
‘Who’s that?’
‘My grandmother.’
‘She looks remarkable. It’s hardly suitable to say it here but she looks as if she knows how to enjoy life.’
I said, and I meant it, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m very sorry about your mother.’ He’d said that before, perhaps he had forgotten. ‘I’d have liked her for a stepmother.’
Someone must have introduced him to Asta, for I came upon them in Swanny’s drawing room, deep in talk. She was telling him the story of the man her cousin knew in Sweden who murdered his mistress to get their child for his wife. I wondered if Swanny had also speculated about any relevance this story might have to her own origins, though hardly casting Far in the killer’s role.
In the event, I did nothing about getting Swanny to a psychiatrist, Daniel Blain or anyone else. My mother’s death affected her deeply but it distracted her from her own troubles. It also drew her closer to me or me to her. Her sister Marie had been her closest woman friend, she had no child of her own. It was only natural that I should become, at least in her own eyes, her daughter.
She mourned. She grieved for her sister. She drew closer once more to Torben who shared her sorrow, who sympathized utterly. He had loved my mother as a sister but I hope I don’t wrong him in saying that as far as he was concerned, if she had to die, there was no better time for her to have done it. Her death restored his wife to him and banished from her mind—as far as he could tell—all that introspective brooding over her origins.