Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  The baby’s incessant crying was one of the factors which drove the Uptons to leave. They also complained of the decline in the quality of the meals provided, now that Lizzie was no longer available to do the cooking. Mrs Upton told Cora Green there were bugs in the bedroom walls. After they had gone Mrs Hyde made no move to find replacements for them. She moved Mr Dzerjinski downstairs into what had been Alfred’s rooms, Lizzie and Alfred into what had formerly been his rooms and moved herself next door to Dzerjinski, saying that her weak heart would no longer allow her to climb all those stairs. The top floor she closed off, insisting that it was uneconomical to keep it clean and free of damp.

  Alfred had his wife and baby but in some ways, as far as accommodation went, he was worse off than before his marriage. He was obliged to share the downstairs rooms with the lodgers and to take all his meals with them. His mother-in-law had grudgingly allowed him a room on the top floor for his chemical experiments, but withdrew her permission when she closed up these rooms. Then there was the noise. Dzerjinski was something of a virtuoso on the accordion and had performed on various music hall stages. He practised this instrument, often long into the night, as well as giving English lessons to Russian and German immigrants in his rooms. The noise of the accordion and the mutter of guttural speech penetrating the walls and ceiling was often appalling.

  Miss Cottrell remained for a further four years. According to Cora Green, Lizzie Roper took no interest in her child but left him in the care first of the nurse and, after the nurse’s departure, when Maria would agree to this, of her mother. The ‘gentleman friend’, mentioned by Miss Cottrell, who apparently visited the house before Alfred’s arrival there, was seen to reappear—he or perhaps another. Certainly, during the next two or three years, there was more than one.

  A man that Cora Green heard Lizzie refer to as ‘Bert’ was in the habit of calling for her in a carriage. This seems to have been Herbert Cobb, whom Mrs Green describes as a manager of a gentlemen’s outfitters. He was well-known to Miss Cottrell, who was fortunate he did not sue her for libel when her book came out. She refers to him, with moral vigour, as a ‘home-breaker’ and ‘fiend in human form’, as a frequenter of loose women, dishonest, irreverent, foul-mouthed and one who uttered blasphemies.

  Lizzie had another string to her bow. Percy Middlemass, a businessman and frequent patron of the Plume of Feathers, said to be in late middle age and very prosperous, also came to the house and remained inside alone with Lizzie for several hours. Ironsmith, the traveller in canned meats who had left his lodgings and gone abroad, Mrs Green also alleged had reappeared and sometimes visited Lizzie. One day in the late summer of 1903 Mrs Green met him in the street, coming away from Devon Villa, and recognized him at once, though he pretended not to know her.

  Alfred himself, of course, was out of the house for twelve hours each day, leaving Lizzie free to enjoy herself as she pleased. If he was aware of her activities at that time we have no knowledge of it but his general air of unhappiness and decline in health was noted by, among others, John Smart, the young man who had advocated Fulham as a suitable area in which to live. Alfred, he said, had grown thin and acquired a stoop as very tall men sometimes do. Smart said he sometimes complained of dyspepsia and said he no longer slept well.

  In May 1904 Lizzie Roper was delivered of a daughter and two months later the child was christened Edith Elizabeth at St John’s Church. From the first, Lizzie’s attitude towards the baby was quite different from that which she had adopted towards her son Edward. For one thing, she nursed the infant herself. She took Edith out in the perambulator and proudly showed her off to the neighbours. Visits from Cobb, Middlemass and the rest seem to have ceased, at least for the time being.

  Alfred became happier, according to Smart, and was excitedly anticipating taking his family on holiday to Margate in August. He was proud of his daughter but it was his son Edward on whom he seems to have lavished most of his affection. While the boy was little, owing to his mother’s defection, Alfred had been with him and tended to him more than is usual with fathers in our society. This may in part have contributed to the extravagant love he felt for his son. Letters from Alfred to his sister Maud, in the present writer’s possession, are full of Edward, his good looks, prodigious behaviour and learning abilities, as well as long quotations from the boy’s precocious remarks. Indeed, several of them contain little else. Lizzie and the child Edith are mentioned only as joining with Alfred in the sending of love—a surely empty message when we consider that, as far as we know, they and Maud had never met.

  Alfred told John Smart that he hoped there would be no increase to his family as he would need all he earned to educate Edward properly. There was to be, he averred, no elementary school and Free Grammar School for him. Nor was he to miss his chance of the university because his father had made inadequate provision for the rest of the family, as had happened in his own case. Alfred believed Edward to be an exceptional child and mentions in his letters to Maud the boy’s ability to read and do simple sums at the age of four and a half. He also sees it as a sign of future intellect that Edward walked at nine months and was talking articulately at eighteen months.

  The happily anticipated holiday may have taken place or it may not, we have no way of knowing, but in August two momentous events took place. Miss Cottrell moved out of Devon Villa after a scene with Mrs Hyde in which she accused her landlady of keeping a house of call and of acting as a procuress for her own daughter, and Alfred Roper lost his job.

  It is Cora Green’s ‘journalism’ that provides us with this insight into Miss Cottrell’s relations with Maria Hyde. According to Mrs Green, Miss Cottrell had for some time been making insinuations about Lizzie Roper’s moral character, this in spite of the fact that the former ‘gentleman friends’ seem to have ceased calling. Now, however, she was not only suggesting that Maria Hyde had acted as a go-between for her daughter, but that Edith Roper was not Alfred’s child.

  One day, again according to Mrs Green, a violent quarrel took place in which Miss Cottrell said the house was dirty, there were bugs in the walls, Lizzie was no better than a street girl and Alfred Roper should know the truth. ‘For two pins’ she would tell him everything. Maria told her to get out of the house and later had Dzerjinski help her bring Miss Cottrell’s property downstairs and put it out into the street. That then was the end of Maria Hyde’s career as a lodging-house-keeper, unless one counts Dzerjinski as a lodger, though he certainly paid no rent.

  The Supreme Remedy Company abruptly ceased trading one morning in early August. Substantial sums of money were owed and the company’s creditors appeared in the street outside, clamouring at the door for the settlement of its debts. It was believed that Robert Maddox had absconded to the Continent with the company’s funds. However there were no funds, or none was ever found. Maddox had not gone to France but, travelling no further than Dover, had taken a room in an hotel and there shot himself. The company’s nine employees, including the manager, lost their jobs.

  No doubt, this was a considerable blow to Alfred Roper. He had a large house to maintain and five adults and two children to support. There was no other source of income, if we discount, as we probably can, the most heinous of Miss Cottrell’s allegations. Alfred set about looking for work and eventually found himself a situation as a clerk with a firm that manufactured lenses, Imperial Optics Limited. The salary was half what he had been earning before and the only advantage Imperial Optics seems to have had over the Supreme Remedy Company, if advantage it was, lay in the proximity of its situation to his home. Alfred could now walk to work, for his new employment was in Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green.

  Soon after this, Cora Green also left the district. She moved only as far as Stoke Newington and occasionally came back to visit her friend Maria Hyde but she was no longer a neighbour, able to keep an eye on the comings and goings at the house next door. Mystery shrouds Devon Villa for a period of almost a year. True, Florence Fisher was there
, and Florence Fisher’s was some of the most important evidence at Alfred’s trial. But she was not an observant young woman, she spent the greater part of her time, when she was not engaged in cleaning the upper rooms, in the kitchen, scullery and her own quarters, and at this period had outside interests. Her mother had died and there was no home to visit up on the Marshes, but she had begun ‘walking out’ with a young man she later referred to as her fiancé. Ernest Henry Herzog, in good service with a family in Islington, and himself the grandson of immigrants, was a year younger than his sweetheart and socially a cut above her, but in the event they were never married and he need not concern us further here. Florence, however, at last had a life of her own. If there were scenes of recrimination, accusation and reproach upstairs, she paid no attention to them.

  In the spring of 1905 things began to change. John Smart, who had remained Alfred’s friend, who was indeed his only friend, had a meeting with him in April. They met in an ABC teashop and Alfred was accompanied by his son Edward. On this occasion he imparted to Smart two highly significant pieces of information. One was that he had come to believe he was not Edith’s father. His wife had said as much during the course of one of their quarrels, though she later retracted and said she had been ‘having him on’. Nevertheless, Alfred said, he had for a long time doubted Edith’s paternity, as he doubted the paternity of the child Lizzie was now expecting.

  Smart was deeply shocked by these revelations. He even volunteered his own opinion that Edith closely resembled Alfred but Alfred was not to be shaken in his beliefs. He told Smart he saw no reason why he should be expected to ‘keep his nose to the grindstone’ to feed a whole family and its ‘by-blows’ who were nothing to him. He had been a fool to marry, he knew that now, but at least out of his marriage he had got Edward.

  The other news he gave Smart was that he had heard of a situation that would soon be vacant for a pharmacist in a large and flourishing shop in Cambridge. No, he had not found this job advertised in the situations vacant columns of a newspaper. A fellow clerk at Imperial Optics was cousin to the man who presently held the post and who would shortly be retiring. The clerk, a man called Hodges, gave it as his opinion that the situation would be Alfred’s for the asking if he made application within the next month. Moreover, Maud, the sister he had always felt closest to out of his four siblings, lived with her husband in the village of Fen Ditton just outside the city.

  Smart said the idea was an excellent one and advised Alfred to apply immediately. By these means, Alfred could remove his wife and children from the possible evil influence of her mother and start a new life. Ah, no, was Alfred’s rejoinder. That was not at all what he had in mind. Rather he intended to leave Lizzie and her daughter and begin this job in Cambridge, always supposing he could secure it, describing himself as a widower with an only son. For, of course, he meant to take Edward with him.

  Smart did his best to dissuade Alfred from this course, not only on this occasion but at later meetings. And Alfred did seem to relent a little. Lizzie would have to change her ways if she expected him to stay with her. Mysteriously, he told Smart he was ‘treating’ Lizzie for an ‘illness’, his experience as a pharmacist had taught him what to do. At a later meeting, when Smart again asked him the nature of this illness, Roper called her a nymphomaniac. He said he was treating her with hyoscin hydrobromide, a sexual depressant, to quell the demands she made on him and her need for other men. The whole situation at Devon Villa wearied him utterly. He was at any rate resolved to cease supporting Maria Hyde and Joseph Dzerjinski as soon as this was possible.

  One of these people was soon beyond requiring maintenance by him or anyone else. Joseph Dzerjinski, paying a visit to his sister in Highbury, was taken ill in the street on his way home to Navarino Road. He was found lying on the pavement in a serious condition and was carried to the nearby German Hospital but died before he reached there. The date was early July 1905 and at the end of that month, had he lived, Joseph Dzerjinski would have been seventy-eight years old. An inquest was held and a verdict of death by misadventure recorded. At post mortem a serious heart condition was discovered as well as advanced cirrhosis of the liver. It seems that Alfred was expected to pay for the funeral and that he did so.

  The summer of 1905 was very hot. Sun temperatures of 130° Fahrenheit were recorded. Newspapers were full of stories of people driven mad by the heat and rates of murder and infanticide notably increased. All the windows and the front and back doors of Devon Villa remained open during the hours of daylight but even so the heat was overpowering.

  No other evidence of Lizzie’s pregnancy, apart from that of John Smart, ever emerged, unless we consider her repeated claims of being tired, ‘feeling faint’, morning vomiting and continual drowsiness as evidence, though these symptoms could have derived from her continuous intake of hyoscin hydrobromide. No pregnancy was mentioned by Florence Fisher nor is there a word about it in the letter Maria wrote at this time to the late Joseph Dzerjinski’s sister, Marta Boll. Cora Green did not know of it. No evidence of a pregnancy discovered at post mortem was offered at Roper’s trial.

  Therefore it seems likely that, due to some physical cause or perhaps to the excessive heat, Lizzie lost the child she was expecting by miscarriage some time in the course of that summer. Or else there never had been a child but this was an invention of Lizzie’s to keep her husband from leaving her.

  To leave her may have been what he always intended. The letter he wrote to Mrs Maud Leeming in Fen Ditton on July 15th mentions Lizzie only (again) as sending her love. There is not a word in it about Edith. The situation at Jopling’s in Cambridge was his from August 1st and he asks his sister to receive himself and Edward at her house from July 27th onwards until he can find alternative accommodation for them. On the other hand, in writing of these lodgings he needs to find in the city of Cambridge, he talks of ‘setting up home’ and of a ‘return to family life’.

  At the beginning of the second week of that month he, not his wife, gave Florence Fisher notice. Her services would not be required after July 31st as he, Mrs Roper and the children would be moving to Cambridge. Mrs Hyde would be remaining there and must make her own arrangements but as a woman on her own would not be in need of a servant. Those, according to Florence, were his words.

  Florence appealed to Maria Hyde, who knew nothing of any of this. She in turn spoke to her daughter who expressed a corresponding ignorance. Why Florence was so determined to stay in what was hardly a sinecure, where she was ill-paid and overworked, is unclear. Her accommodation was cramped, dirty and insanitary. She was at this time a strong stout young woman of twenty-two, could certainly have found another situation and there is no doubt Alfred would have given her a good reference. Perhaps she did not wish to enter service elsewhere for what would necessarily be a short time with the marriage she still expected to take place arranged for the following spring.

  Whatever the reason, she was determined to stay at Devon Villa and Roper appears to have said nothing further about her leaving. On the afternoon of July 27th Mrs Hyde told Florence she was feeling unwell with pains down her left arm and in her chest. It was her heart ‘playing up’, she said, and she must lie down. Then Alfred appeared, told her he and Edward were departing ‘shortly’ for Cambridge and added that Mrs Roper and Edith would be coming up to join him ‘very soon’. Florence did not see him leave the house but supposed that he had done so.

  Three-quarters of an hour later he was back, ringing the front doorbell and declaring that he had left his sovereign case behind. This was of silver and had belonged to his father. Florence offered to help him look for it but this offer he refused, told her to get on with her own work and opened the door for her to go into the dining room where she had linen to collect for the wash. She heard him go upstairs where his wife, Edith and Maria Hyde were.

  Some half-hour prior to Roper’s return Maria Hyde had come down to the kitchen, saying she was better and asking Florence to make tea and prepare
a light supper to be taken upstairs. Her daughter was ill, she said, and lying down in bed. This Florence did and Maria took the tray upstairs herself. On it, as well as tinned salmon and bread and butter, was a pot of tea, the sugar basin and milk for Edith. This sugar basin with its contents was to become an important exhibit at Roper’s trial three months later. Roper himself did not take sugar in tea or prepared drinks and nor did his mother-in-law or Florence Fisher.

  Roper was upstairs a long time, no doubt hunting for his sovereign case. According to his own evidence at his trial, he said he finally found it on the dining-room mantelpiece. With the case in his pocket, he walked to the cab rank in Kingsland High Street, a considerable distance, and on the way claimed to have tripped over a loose kerbstone and fallen, grazing his right hand. One person at least said he had seen blood on Roper’s hand and on his coat sleeve but was later unable to identify him.

  He reached Liverpool Street Station at last, where he had left his small son and his luggage in the care of the porter. Originally, he had intended to catch the 5.15 train for Cambridge and would have been in ample time to have done so if he had not returned to Navarino Road. However, the time was now almost 6.30 and though there was a train which ran as far as Bishops Stortford, the 7.32, none went all the way to Cambridge until the 8.20. Roper and his son had almost two hours to wait.

  One of the mysteries in this case is why Roper deferred his journey to Cambridge until so late in the day. He had resigned from his employment in Bethnal Green, he had no work to go to and no particular duties in the house. According to the Great Eastern Railway’s timetable for July 1905, there were many trains running to Cambridge throughout the day. He could, for instance, have caught the twelve noon, or, if he had wanted a non-stopping train, gone to St Pancras instead and caught the 12.20, reaching Cambridge at 1.31. He could have aimed for the 2.30, which stopped only twice before reaching its destination at just before ten to four.