by Ruth Rendell
‘I’m sure there’s nothing about my aunt’s babyhood that hasn’t already appeared in print.’
‘Your aunt’s babyhood? Ann, who’s your aunt? I don’t even know who your aunt is.’
‘Swanny Kjær.’
‘O God, yes. I’m sorry, I knew she was some relative, it hadn’t really registered she was your aunt. What about her babyhood? You surely haven’t had the paparazzi pestering you about that?’
I asked her, if it wasn’t that, what was it?
‘Ann, could we meet? Would you? Could you bear it?’
I thought for a moment and decided I could. Of course I could. ‘But you can tell me what for?’
‘Roper,’ she said. ‘I want to do a series on Roper.’
I said, truthfully, that I didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘In Volume I, in Asta, the very first entries, there’s a bit about what’s she called, the maid …’
‘Hansine.’
‘Yes, Hansine, coming home and saying she’d made friends with the maid in a lodging house in the next street or a street nearby.’
That was probably the first instance of someone approaching me and taking it for granted I had all the diaries’ contents, word for word, off by heart. Soon there were to be many. ‘I suppose so.’
‘And she goes on to say more later, about the woman coming to tea with Hansine and the people she works for. Well, the people she worked for were Roper and his wife and mother-in-law. There! D’you mean you really didn’t know?’
The name meant nothing to me. I wonder now that I didn’t ask to be enlightened but I didn’t and just made a date with Cary to meet her in two days’ time. The beginnings of curiosity came when I’d put the phone down. I found my own copy of Asta and read those first entries. There was no mention of anyone called Roper. I found the references to the old man falling down in the street, to Hansine’s friend and the people she worked for. They were a man and his wife and the wife’s mother. The maid spoke of ‘her mistress, Mrs Hyde’, not Mrs Roper. Later on, Asta wrote how she went to the street where these people lived, looked at their house and saw a woman come out with a child.
That was in the entry for July 26th, 1905, two days before Swanny’s birth. There were no more entries until August 30th, something I’d never noticed before and which rather surprised me, though it did no more than that at the time. Gaps did occur in the diaries, Asta hadn’t written in her notebooks every day, nor for that matter every week. Later on I found a reference on October 15th to ‘the man who murdered his wife in Navarino Road’, but again no name was given. That was all. No explanation, no details. Asta evidently wasn’t much concerned. Nor was I—then.
Of much more interest was the next letter I opened. It was from someone called Paul Sellway.
Here was a name that meant something to me but I wasn’t sure what. I thought about it for a moment before reading what he had to say. Sellway, Sellway … Had some relative of Maureen’s, Ken’s wife, married a Sellway? I got no further. I read it.
He wanted me to know how he sympathized with me on the death of my aunt. He just remembered her, having met her once when he was a boy and soon after his grandmother died. The letter was several paragraphs long but it wasn’t until the last one that he explained who he was. The son of Joan (née Cropper) and Ronald Sellway, born in 1943, and therefore the grandson of Hansine Fink. His letter was headed: Dr P. G. Sellway, with an address in London E8.
I found myself, for some reason, imagining how Asta would have reacted. She had been a snob and, like most snobs, with no justification for such an attitude. To learn that Paul Sellway was a doctor (a calling she deeply respected though rather disliked) would have made her incredulous. What, the grandson of illiterate Hansine, a doctor! The descendant of that Fink, that peasant, like the wretched Karoline, no better than a farm animal! That Morfar himself came out of the same sort of stable (in more senses than one) affected this view not at all. She herself had the dubious distinction of being two generations, instead of one, away from clogs.
Swanny had felt very differently. Pursuing her search for her own origins, she had gone to Hansine’s daughter. This was about two years after my mother’s death. She had adjusted to her younger sister’s dying, was used to the fact of it, had learned to use her Wednesdays in other ways and accustom herself to the absence of that daily phone call. Into that empty space, in much the same way as nature abhors a vacuum, returned her anxieties about her own provenance.
Hansine herself, though only a few months older than Asta, had died in the early fifties. That death, or its aftermath, must have been the occasion of Swanny’s encounter with Paul Sellway. I’ve a vague memory, not of Swanny’s going to Hansine’s funeral—neither she nor my mother nor Asta did that—but of her calling on the daughter some days or weeks later for a purpose now forgotten. Perhaps Hansine asked Joan Sellway to give Swanny something of hers for a keepsake. Swanny had been her favourite among the Westerby children, as she was Asta’s.
Now Swanny went to see her again, though it wasn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, Joan Sellway had moved. Swanny phoned the old number and got a stranger who had no idea where the Sellways now were. You have to understand that Swanny both wanted to find her and did not want to find her. She wanted to know the truth and she was at the same time afraid to know it. She was once more working herself up into a state.
I was to trace her. Swanny wasn’t the first person to treat me, because of my profession, like a private detective. I would know how to go about it, I would run her to earth. In fact, anyone could have done it, there was no difficulty. Joan Sellway or Ronald Sellway, her husband, weren’t in the London phone book because they had moved outside the range of its area. I found her in Borehamwood in the local directory.
And now I must be careful what I say about Joan Sellway. I never knew her, I can’t speak from experience and it would be wrong in me, particularly in me, to report on her character from hearsay. In any case, she was no more than cold to Swanny and she seemed simply not to understand.
She was a tall fair-haired woman, big-boned and gaunt, that Swanny called ‘a certain Danish type’, with large blue eyes and strong capable hands. Her response to Swanny’s questions was to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At last, as if by a great effort to take the ravings of madness seriously, she came out triumphantly with, ‘Why don’t you ask your mother?’
Swanny said she had and explained the result of asking.
‘I’d rather you talked to my son,’ Mrs Sellway kept saying.
This, of course, was the Paul of the letter. She very much wanted Swanny to refer all this to her son, evidently the rock she leant on after her husband had left her, and Swanny’s asking how would he know, he wasn’t there, had very little effect.
‘I wasn’t there,’ Joan Sellway said.
Swanny could see no resemblance in her to Hansine. Asta’s maid-of-all-work had been a jolly smiling woman, motherly where Asta wasn’t, caring and dependable. Or that was how she remembered her.
‘I just thought your mother might have said something to you about that time. I mean about the time she was with my mother.’
‘She didn’t.’
And then Swanny understood from Joan Sellway’s manner, a kind of retreat even further into herself, a terrible anger totally repressed, that she had never wanted to know about her mother’s life before her marriage, had perhaps asked her not to speak of it in front of her husband, her son. Her mother had been in service. Her mother had been in a menial position in the employ of this woman’s mother. And what had she done that she should be subjected to these mean inquiries from a woman who was no better than she, she with her nice house in Borehamwood, her son about to be a doctor? Probably the woman had only come there, was only asking, to mock her, to taunt her with her mother’s humble, even shameful, origins. Swanny knew she must not press it but knew too that Joan Sellway had nothing to
tell, knew nothing, was as ignorant as she was but with no desire to end that ignorance, no motive for ending it.
Swanny was humbled. She saw, or thought she saw, that she was making a fool of herself, but she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t stop. She was worse than before my mother died. And all the time she was afraid that Asta herself would soon be beyond disclosing the truth. Even if she were willing to do so, Asta herself would have declined too far into senility to remember or to speak coherently of her memories. In fact, there were no signs as far as I could see, at that time, when Asta was in her ninth decade, that she was anything other than she had always been, capricious, stubborn, self-absorbed, outrageous and curiously charming.
It was Torben who had put the idea of her approaching senility into Swanny’s head. Asta’s senility, in his view, was responsible for what he called ‘this whole sad business’. Swanny wanted to think her senile because that might mean the ‘sad business’ was what Torben thought it was, a lot of nonsense. But if Asta was senile would she ever be able to tell her daughter the truth, always supposing she wanted to?
She went to Uncle Harry. He was younger than Asta by two or three years but had worn less well. Who hadn’t? He still lived alone but was looked after by his bevy of daughters, all married and all but one living nearby in Leyton.
Asta used to say how much he loved Swanny, how he’d taken to her when first they met when she was only fourteen. He called on Asta at Padanaram to give her a first-hand account of her son’s death. It was quite the usual thing, something survivors of war did, went to bereaved parents to comfort them with the story of the dead child’s last hours, his courage, his fortitude in suffering and his glorious—it always had to be that—his glorious, noble, courageous death. Emily had answered the door to him but it was Swanny he found when she showed him into the drawing room and Swanny he spoke to during the ten minutes they waited for Asta to come down.
‘Your brother,’ he said to her, ‘told me he’d got a dear little sister but he never said she was a beauty.’
When she went over to Leyton, to Essex Road where he lived in half a big terraced Edwardian house, she found him alone, the daughter from the flat upstairs having just cleared away his lunch things, made up the fire and brought him the newspaper. When young he had apparently been as fine and tall a man as Paul Sellway’s grandfather Sam Cropper, only fair where Sam was dark, but age had shrunk and bent him. His face had taken on the pinkish-whitishness of a child that feels the cold. He had Parkinson’s and his hands shook constantly, but he was still funny and gallant and cheerful. He took Swanny’s hand and kissed it. No one knew where he had acquired this un-English habit, which so endeared him to Asta. He always kissed her hand and she loved it. Swanny told him everything. He was easy to talk to and a good listener. He had had to be, going about with Asta as he did.
At last he said, ‘She’s never said a word to me.’
Swanny wailed, ‘She won’t tell me! Could she have made it all up? Could she?’
‘I’ll tell you something, dear, for what it’s worth. I’ve heard all my life about it’s a wise child knows its own father but that’s rot, isn’t it? You can always see parents in a child and a child in its parents. It’s harder to tell with your own because you don’t really know what you look like yourself, you don’t see yourself straight in mirrors. But with others, when you know the parents and the children, you can always see. And when you can’t that means trouble.’
‘You knew my father,’ Swanny said. She corrected herself. ‘You knew Rasmus Westerby, you know Asta. Can you see them in my face? Can you see either of them?’
‘Dear,’ he said, ‘have you got to ask me that?’
She said she had to ask him that, she had to.
He was quiet for a minute. He held her hand. ‘Then the answer’s no. No, I can’t. I never have and it’s been a puzzle to me. That’s why I’m not surprised by what you’ve asked me, not a bit. You see, after we got to know each other well, your mother and me, after we got to be friends, I waited for her to tell me. I thought, the day’s going to come when Asta’ll tell me that girl’s not hers, that little beauty’s not hers, she adopted her. But it never did. I love your dear mother, there’s no harm saying that now, but you were too lovely-looking to be their child.’
He kissed her when she left, very tenderly. He promised, unasked, to ask Asta himself. If he did Asta told him nothing or nothing that found its way back to Swanny. Asta wasn’t at all pleased that Swanny had been questioning him.
‘The poor old man, plaguing the life out of him like that,’ she said. ‘He had tears in his eyes when he told me what you’d said.’
‘I simply asked him if he knew you’d adopted me.’
‘It was a shock for a poor old man with a bad heart. And of course the only result has been to make him think you’re a crazy woman, lille Swanny. As if you could be anything but my own child and my husband’s!’
‘But I’m not, Mor, you’ve told me I’m not.’
‘That doesn’t mean I want all the world to know it, does it? Have a bit of sense, please. Why ask him, anyway? You were fourteen before I met him. What would he know?’
‘He’s your closest friend, that’s why.’
A rather proud dreamy look came over Mormor’s face then, Swanny said.
‘It’s been a lonely life for him. He never remarried. I don’t suppose I’ve ever told you this, but he asked me to marry him. Oh, a long time ago now.’
Swanny was so exasperated by her mother at this point that she really wished Mormor had married Harry because if she had she’d be living in Leyton now and looking after him. ‘Why didn’t you?’
The sweeping glance in one direction, the wave of the hand in the other. ‘Oh, really, it wouldn’t have been suitable. It’s all right for you with your nice husband and your fine house but I didn’t much like it the first time round. Why risk it again? People change when they get married, let me tell you. I’d rather have a friend than a husband.’
Harry died a few weeks later. But he knew nothing, he had nothing to tell.
The years went by. Swanny told me she made the utmost efforts to stop herself asking Asta again to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t stop herself. She nagged Asta to tell her and Asta rejoined in various ways. She would say it didn’t matter, it wasn’t important, or else that she had forgotten or that Swanny should stop worrying about something which would only be significant if her adoptive mother had not loved her. She, Asta, plainly did love her, had always loved her best of her children, so why was she being so foolish?
Then Asta played her trump card, or she may have simply been tired of being nagged and playing games didn’t come into it. She was sitting down more by this time, though usually on the edge of the chair in a restless way. Not tense, though, she was never that. She put her head back and turned up her eyes, in the way the exasperated do. It is supposed to be a hangover from a time when people looked to heaven and asked God to grant them patience.
‘Suppose I said it wasn’t true, I made it all up?’ Swanny began to tremble. This was a more and more frequent reaction to her mother’s comments on the question of her origins. She would shake and sometimes her teeth would chatter. She looked at Asta, trembling, and Asta said, ‘Let’s say that, shall we, lille Swanny? I made it all up because I’m a bad old woman who likes to tease. That’s what happened and now we’ll say no more about it, let there be an end to it.’
‘And I suppose you wrote the letter?’ Swanny said scathingly.
One of those light shrugs, a sidelong look, a smile. ‘If you like. If it makes you happy.’
Swanny had made up her mind to do a daring and dreadful thing, a thing which at first she could hardly contemplate without shame. It was some time after Asta’s death before she brought herself to tell me. While she spoke, in a low voice, she looked away. She intended to take the first opportunity that presented itself to search Asta’s room and go through her things.
Her chance came whe
n Asta went to stay with Ken and Maureen. This visit was unprecedented. Asta didn’t much like Ken, she used to say she’d never got over her irritation with him for changing his name. But Mogens had also called himself something else and she seems not to have objected to that. The truth probably was that she had never wanted Ken in the first place, she had wanted a girl. The son she had been fondest of was Mads, the baby who died. Swanny, in a rare fit of exasperation, once said that if he had lived he would certainly have changed his name and this, incongruously, made Asta laugh.
Ken and Maureen had often invited her to stay but she always refused. They had moved from the Baker Street flat when Ken retired and were living in Twickenham. Asta said she didn’t like suburbs. Hampstead was different, she wouldn’t call Hampstead a suburb, except the bit that was a Garden Suburb which wasn’t Hampstead at all to her way of thinking but Finchley. Always an explorer and observer, she had watched it being built. Ken and Maureen pressed their case again when Torben went into hospital.
He’d had a heart attack and had made a very good recovery. Swanny spent a large part of every day in the hospital with him. When Ken heard about this he told Asta she must be lonely in that big house on her own and he told Swanny it would ‘be a bit of a rest’ for her to have their mother off her hands for a couple of weeks. Asta, of course, wasn’t really on her hands, she wasn’t at all a typical ninety-year-old, needing care and attention. She was independent, she had all her faculties.