Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Have you come disturbing me to ask a fool question like that?’ That’s his charming way of talking to me.

  ‘I thought I’d ask,’ I said, ‘before you waste your time making baby toys. Because, in case you’ve forgotten, Mogens is thirteen and Knud is eleven.’

  He never likes being told anything, so he changed the subject to ask me why I didn’t call them Jack and Ken. He’s so madly in love with England that everything has to be English for him.

  ‘If you want to make something,’ I said, ‘why don’t you make Swanny a doll’s house?’

  He didn’t answer. ‘Haven’t you got anything to do indoors?’ he said.

  Those are our conversations. I’ve only just noticed it. We both ask questions and neither of us supplies answers.

  March 5th, 1912

  Hansine has a man courting her. I never thought that would happen, though, when I come to think of it, she’d had one before in Copenhagen. This morning she asked if she might speak to me and when I asked her what it was about, said could she have a friend of hers to tea in the kitchen.

  Naturally I thought she meant a woman, another servant like herself. There have been a few friends of that sort over the years. But when I said, ‘Is she in service in our street, Hansine?’ she looked very shifty and blushed up and twisted her apron in her hands the way they do.

  ‘It’s not a she, it’s a he,’ she said.

  I couldn’t help laughing, at the way she put it really, which sounds very funny in Danish. But of course she thought I was laughing at her, I was so astonished or something, and she looked as if she was going to cry.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean that, it’s just that it was a surprise. Of course you can have him to tea. What’s his name?’

  ‘Sam Cropper,’ she said, ‘and he’s on the railway.’

  That may not sound funny to English ears, it may sound quite normal, but it sounded hilarious to me. I did my best to keep a straight face but she could see my lips twitching. She thinks me very unkind. I know she does because little Swanny told me so a few weeks back.

  She calls me lille Mor, which is very sweet. ‘Lille Mor,’ she said, ‘Hansine said to me, your mother can be very unkind sometimes, and I said, well, she’s not unkind to me, because you’re not, are you, not ever?’

  ‘I hope not, my darling,’ I said, but I was seething inside.

  I felt like sending for Hansine and asking her how dare she say things like that to my daughter, that I was the mistress of this house, and she could take her notice if she was going to talk like that. But of course I couldn’t quite do that. Not in the circumstances. We’ve known each other a long time now, Hansine and I, we’ve been through a lot together. So if she thinks me unkind she must think it. I am sometimes. People haven’t been very kind to me and you give back what you get.

  I couldn’t help wondering what sort of a man would find her attractive, though. Her face is heavy and flat and reminds me of a big piece of mutton, the cut they call the saddle. When you say a woman is blonde and blue-eyed you give people—especially men——the idea she’s beautiful. They want to meet her. But features are more important in my opinion. Hansine’s got the fair hair and the blue eyes and she’s also got a mouth like a sauceboat and a nose like a spoon. She’s what the English call a strapping wench. I read that in a novel, not a very good one that I bought, so I’m going to join the public library to get good books out.

  She fetched Swanny from school and brought tea for me and the girls at four o’clock. We have to have it in the dining room with a piece of drugget covering the carpet because little Marie throws food out of her high chair all over the place, laughing and waving a spoon about. I can’t stand too much of it and usually have to ring the bell for Emily to take her away and feed her somewhere else. But today I carried her outside myself.

  There was no sign of Emily. Hansine and a tall handsome man were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating far nicer-looking cakes than the ones sent into the dining room. Hansine had a silk blouse on, one of mine that I’d given her, and she’d hidden her apron away somewhere. It’s a strange thing, you’d think handsome men would want handsome girls but they almost never do. They seem to prefer the plain ones which is a bit of a waste really. This Cropper looks like a photograph I’ve seen of a famous lawyer called Edward Marshall Hall and far too upright and distinguished for a common working man. I wonder what he does on the railway. If he’s a porter all the women must want him to carry their luggage.

  They looked quite put out at the sight of me, as well they might. Hansine went even redder than her normal colour.

  ‘Where’s Emily?’ I said in English and Hansine said a stifled, ‘In there, ma’am,’ pointing a thumb.

  Poor Emily had been relegated to the scullery where she was sitting all on her own with a cup of tea and a hunk of bread and jam. I dumped little Marie in her lap and sailed back through the kitchen. They were staring like cats and as silent as rabbits.

  June 2nd, 1913

  A letter this morning from my cousin Ejnar, the one who’s an officer in the Danish Army, saying Tante Frederikke is dead. I think he might have telegraphed me, not that I would have gone all that way to the funeral. It’s nine years since I saw Tante and time dims things. If I tell Rasmus he may insist I go into mourning and I don’t want to wear black in the summertime, so I don’t think I’ll tell him.

  Ejnar says Tante Frederikke wanted me to have her collection of the works of Charles Dickens translated into Danish. I shan’t say no. I can read English well, of course I can after eight years, I’m sure I read it better than a lot of English people, Emily for instance, but it will never be like my own language to me. We have few books in this house, I’ve noticed that for the first time. No one reads but me.

  Mourning is all humbug unless you loved the person. I didn’t love Tante, though she said she loved me, she said I was the daughter she never had. Love hasn’t much chance of survival in a relationship where one person is always telling the other one what to do and bullying and preaching. I don’t suppose I ever saw Tante without her criticizing me, my looks, my manners, my way of talking, my clothes, my tastes, not to mention my morals. Though I hadn’t got any morals, I didn’t know what they were, I was good because I had no chance to be bad and because I was afraid.

  I shall make myself sad if I go on like this. Besides, as Tante used to say so monotonously, it doesn’t do to be always thinking about oneself. ‘Come out of yourself, Asta,’ she was always saying. I’ll be glad to have the books, they are all I want of what was hers.

  So I’ll write about Hansine instead. She is walking out with Cropper now. She meets him regularly on her afternoon off and I’m sure he comes here more often than I know. Even Rasmus, who never notices what people do or even if people are there, even Rasmus has seen him about. There was a very funny thing which I must write down. I wasn’t going to at first because I was thinking it’s wrong to laugh on the day I heard of Tante’s death. But that’s about as silly as can be. If I was going to be serious I should have done that two weeks ago when she actually died, not today. Anyway, I need all the laughing I can get.

  Rasmus didn’t say a word till he’d seen Cropper hanging about the house three times. Then he put on his preacher face, the one that makes him look like the Lutheran pastor at the church when we lived in Hackney.

  ‘Who is your friend, Asta?’ he said to me.

  ‘What friend?’ I said.

  ‘The tall gentleman I saw in the garden yesterday.’

  I knew then. I guessed. But I led him on, I pretended I didn’t know what he meant, I even looked guilty. Then at last I said, as if light had suddenly dawned, ‘Oh, I know who you mean. That was no gentleman, Rasmus, that was Hansine’s suitor.’

  He went a fiery red. For one thing, he doesn’t want me to think he could ever be jealous, not a clever, busy, important engineer like him. And for another, he knows he ought to be able to tell a working man
from a gentleman, like any Englishman could. Of course, apart from his clothes Cropper doesn’t look like a working man. I expect Rasmus thought I was following in the footsteps of Mrs Roper—only he’s never heard of her, and just as well.

  July 6th, 1913

  My birthday once again. I am thirty-three today and soon to be middle-aged, if middle age begins at thirty-five, as my father used to say.

  Rasmus forgot, as usual. My next-door neighbour, Mrs Evans, told me she doesn’t give her husband a chance to forget her birthday or their wedding anniversary but reminds him every day for two weeks beforehand. ‘Now you know what Friday week is, don’t you, dear?’ she says to him and, ‘You know what next Thursday is, you know what tomorrow is?’ I wouldn’t lower myself to do that. If he doesn’t care enough to remember I’d rather he forgot. Presents are dust and ashes when they come from duty.

  I expect Hansine jogged the children’s memories. She wouldn’t dare remind Rasmus. Anyway, they all gave me presents: a tiny pair of scissors in a pigskin purse from Mogens, two handkerchiefs initialled A in a silver box from Knud and a thimble from Marie because I’d made a hole in my old one with the point of a bodkin. I’ve left Swanny’s till last to write about it separately because it was the only home-made one, the only one I like to think of as made with love. It was a pen wiper she sewed herself, very beautiful small hemstitches round the border of a lovely piece of violet-coloured felt with a red rose embroidered on it—she knows red roses are my favourite flowers—and ‘Mor’ in pink chainstitch. I shan’t use that for wiping any pens. I’ll keep it for ever.

  Just before supper Rasmus came in, holding an instrument. I’d never seen one before though I’d seen pictures. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘a telephone. How d’you like that?’

  ‘Is that my birthday present?’ I said.

  I could see him thinking. ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Who’s going to use it, then?’

  ‘I need it for business, naturally,’ he said. ‘But you can use it too.’

  I saw this line printed on the screen at the moving pictures last week and I’ve been dying to use it ever since. ‘Thanks a million,’ I said.

  He sulked for the next hour. I pity the poor children if one of them says anything to him when he’s in that mood. Except of course Marie, who can do no wrong. She’s the naughtiest child I’ve had, never still, always tearing about and playing tricks. This afternoon she did an awful thing, went to Hansine and said, ‘Mor’s fallen down on the floor and her eyes are closed and she can’t speak.’

  Hansine came running up the stairs in a terrible state and found me quietly sitting in my bedroom, writing this diary. Well, she didn’t find me writing it, I’d quickly put it in the drawer, but she found me sitting calmly, looking out of the window. Marie had done it to get attention, I suppose. I’ve found that little children don’t like it when you’re writing or reading. They feel shut out by these activities which they can’t do and can’t even comprehend.

  Still, she mustn’t be allowed to tell lies and get away with it. I gave her a hard smack and I told Rasmus what his little favourite had done. But all he said was how clever she must be to know how to do that at only two years and five months. I wonder why he loves her best. She looks exactly like I did at that age, she’s going to look just like me when she grows up. She’s even got my peacock-blue eyes, my high cheekbones and thin lips, and her hair is the colour of wet sand.

  So, another birthday gone by!

  September 20th, 1913

  We are going to move.

  My dear husband informed me of that fact this morning. I am sure there must be marriages in which the husband and wife do things together, though I don’t really know about other marriages, I only know what I observe from watching couples arm-in-arm or when we go, as we very occasionally do, to the homes of people who buy motor cars from Rasmus. Perhaps those women’s husbands don’t consult them about anything either. But I can’t believe it’s normal for a man to say to the woman he’s been married to for sixteen years that he’s bought a house and you’ll all be moving in next month.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t mind because I’d love to move. I like moving, I like the change, the upheaval, the packing, and especially the first night in the new house. It’s an adventure. But I would like to have some say in choosing the house I’m to live in, I’d like not to be treated like a child or a lunatic.

  ‘Where is it?’ I said.

  ‘Highgate.’

  Immediately I thought of the old village and the horrible old houses round the green or down the West Hill. Nor would I want to live next-door to a cemetery. But, no, for once it sounds as if he has got it right.

  It’s a big modern house in Shepherds Hill called Padanaram.

  9

  I FIRST KNEW Cary Oliver when we were both working at the BBC in the late sixties. She stole my lover from me and married him.

  That sounds very bold and dramatic. I think Cary herself would agree that it’s true. There is really no other way of putting it. I and Daniel Blain, the psychiatrist, son of my mother’s last fiancé, lived together for about five years. It would be an exaggeration to call him the only man I’ve ever loved, though he came close to being that. Cary set her sights on him and took him away.

  I know all the arguments. No one can be taken from someone else, they have to want to go. People are not things to be snatched and borrowed and taken and abandoned. People have free will. If he had really loved me … Well, perhaps he didn’t. It was I who moved out. I didn’t leave him, it was more what they used to call constructive desertion.

  Later on Daniel and Cary got married and still later divorced. He disappeared to America. From time to time I heard of her. More often I saw her name in the credits that follow television productions on screen. She had become quite a successful producer of drama. But until it came over on the answering machine I hadn’t heard her voice for fifteen years, not in fact since the evening she communicated her feelings to me in an ecstatic gasp:

  ‘He’s so good-looking!’

  I didn’t call her back. It was she who had phoned me and I admired her nerve. Fifteen years are nothing, an evening gone, in these matters. If I’m honest I must say I wondered what she could possibly want. The diaries had long been adapted and dramatized for television, not to mention read aloud as ‘A Book at Bedtime’, and a proposal had just come in to put them on audio cassette. But I thought I could live quite contentedly without ever finding out.

  A huge pile of letters of condolence had come, had been coming since Swanny’s death nearly two weeks before. Up until a year before she died Swanny had a secretary who came in three days a week. This woman had dealt efficiently with her correspondence, which of course was enormous, but she had left when Swanny had her first stroke and became incapacitated. Swanny could scarcely have signed a letter, still less taken in the sense of it. Besides, in whose name would she have signed at that stage? Along with the other personality she put on, would she have produced that other persona’s signature?

  So there was no one but me to reply to the letters and I set about working through them. Swanny hadn’t known many people, that is, she had few personal friends, but she had had thousands of fans, or her mother had, and she had represented her mother to them. I’d written my surely hundredth card to a reader thanking her—they were nearly all women—for her letter and assuring her publication of the diaries wouldn’t stop, when Cary phoned.

  She still had her breathless discursive manner. ‘You got my message and you hate me, you’ve been besieged and you’re going to put the phone down, but please, please don’t.’

  My mouth had dried. I sounded hoarse to myself. ‘Cary, I won’t put the phone down.’

  ‘You’ll talk?’

  ‘I am talking.’ I was thinking, what’s this about being besieged? Had I been besieged? I’d been out and the answering machine had been switched off. I said carefully, ‘It’s a very long time since we talked at all.’


  She didn’t speak at the other end but she wasn’t silent.

  ‘You could get a job in one of your own productions,’ I said, ‘as a heavy breather. You’re very good.’

  ‘Oh, Ann, have you forgiven me?’

  ‘Suppose you tell me what you want. Let’s get that straight first. You do want something, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. I said I did. But I’m like a child, I know you think I’m like a child. I want you to tell me everything’s all right first. I want to be forgiven and things made right. I want to start again with a sort of—well, a clean slate.’

  I thought, Daniel should hear you now, but I didn’t say it, I didn’t want to mention his name. ‘OK, I forgive you, Cary. Is that all right?’

  ‘But do you really, Ann?’

  ‘I really do. Now tell me what you want. Surprise me.’

  She did, rather. She waited a while, as if luxuriating in the catharsis of being pardoned, as if it were a warm bath to soak in. The sigh she gave had a purring sound. Then she said, ‘First tell me if you’re putting a total embargo on anyone even taking a peek at the unpublished diaries.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a bit missing from the first diary, as you must know. Are you letting anyone look at it?’

  ‘Is there a bit missing? I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘You haven’t?”

  ‘I don’t even know what you mean, a bit missing. Entries that ought to be there and aren’t or what?’

  ‘If you don’t know, I’ll breathe again, I’ll know there’s a chance for me.’

  The most improbable reason for the request that was to come was that she might be interested in Swanny’s origins. After all, Swanny might have become a well-known figure, broadcasting, and going on television, being interviewed by magazines and so on, but even while she was alive that she was or was not Asta’s natural daughter would have been only of minor interest. It was Asta who interested people. Swanny was only her go-between, in a way her mouthpiece, her interpreter. And now she was dead, public concern was not for her but for the future of the unpublished diaries she might or might not have edited. Still, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that what Cary wanted to know about was Swanny’s birth. I must have been very involved with it myself, more than I was aware of.