Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Anyway, I didn’t. The point of making a will, after all, is that you leave your things to the people you want to have them and Mor certainly wanted me to have hers. I feel so lost without her. Did you know I’d never really been without her, I’ve never been away from her before this? Even when I first got married Torben and I only lived round the corner. The longest separation was those few weeks I spent in Denmark in 1924 when I was nineteen and I first met Torben. All the rest of my life I’ve either seen Mor every day or spoken on the phone to her, and mostly it was that I saw her. Since Far died we’d lived in the same house, twenty years in the same house. I can’t really believe she’s gone. She was so much a part of my life, she was my life. I hear her footstep on the stairs, I hear her voice calling me lille Swanny, I smell the L’Aimant she always wore. The other day I opened a drawer in her dressing-table and a gust of her scent came out, it was full of her, and it was so terrible, it made me weep.

  I shouldn’t write to you like this, I know that. I should be more cheerful or more philosophical. Her death has set me free and there are all sorts of things I used to think I wanted to do when I was free that I can do now. But I don’t want to do them, I’m too depressed to do anything. On the brighter side, the doctor has given me some pills and at least I can sleep. I think I shall sell this house eventually so that at least I don’t have to live with the memories all round me. Write me a line to cheer me up, if you can.

  With much love, as always,

  Tante Swanny

  I hadn’t called her Tante for ages, not since I was fifteen and said pertly, the way teenagers do, that I was going to drop the ‘aunt’ and she didn’t mind, did she? I think she’d forgotten, she was so low and in such a bad way, she’d forgotten that for years and years I’d called her Swanny like everyone else.

  Not that there were many left among that everyone else. Far away from her, in the United States, I found myself trying to work out just who remained to call her by her Christian name. John and Charles, but she hardly ever saw them. Those friends from Embassy days, if any contact had been kept up and I doubted if it had. Daniel’s father, that my mother had been going to marry, had sometimes visited but she’d seen very little of him since she became a widow.

  If I’d gone home then, as I sometimes thought I’d have to, I suppose I’d have moved in and lived with Swanny. After all, part of my dread of being near Daniel and Cary was a reluctance to go back to my flat where he and I had lived together for five years, where every room was imbued with him, would probably smell of him, the soap he always used and his cigarettes, the way Asta’s room smelt of her L’Aimant. I seriously thought of never returning there, of getting someone to clear the flat and an agent to sell it, while I stayed at Willow Road.

  I was considering it, knowing how happy it would make Swanny, going so far as to wonder if the house could be divided into two separate dwellings for her and me, when another letter came from her, saying she had decided to move.

  I don’t like to ask you, as you very likely have other plans, but it would be wonderful if you could be home for Christmas. Do you remember the lovely Christmases we used to have? Christmas means so much to a Dane, the house always so beautifully decorated, the dinner on the Eve. Even last year when poor Mor hardly knew where she was we kept up the tradition, had the almond hidden in the rice, the fruit soup, the goose and the æblekage. I would try to do something like that if you came, even if it were just the two of us.

  My news is that I’ve decided to move. This house suddenly seems enormous. I haven’t yet put it into the hands of an agent but I have been going all over it, clearing things out. It is something to do, something to take my mind off my troubles. I didn’t realize we had so much stuff.

  I started at the top, in the attics which are crammed full of old books of Torben’s and the sort of suitcases that are really hanging wardrobes and which no one would dream of carrying today but were all right when porters did all the lifting. Imagine taking one of those on a plane, made of hide and heavy as lead before you even put anything into it!

  Poor Mor had so little of her own. Her room will be the easiest to clear when I reach there. I didn’t actually realize how few clothes she had left. She must have taken her old dresses and coats one by one to sell at those antique dress places. I wonder what they thought of her. I wonder if they appreciated how wonderful she was or if they thought in their ignorance that she was just a stupid mad old woman.

  You can tell how grim I’m feeling by that last sentence, that I can even suppose for a moment people would feel like that about my darling mother. My darling mother that I loved so dearly. For I did love her, Ann, I loved her much more I believe than most old people love an aged parent. I wanted her to live, I prayed for that. How she would have laughed!

  Well, it’s no good going on like this. As I’ve said, I’ve worked my way through the attics and am making a start on the bedrooms. You must let me know if there’s anything I’ve got that you would like to have. That sounds as if I thought I was going to die myself but I hope you know what I mean. I shall have to get rid of a great deal if I am going to buy a little house up on Holly Mount, which is what I intend.

  How is your work going? Did you go to that Thanksgiving dinner you said you’d been invited to? Let me know if there’s a chance you’ll be home in the next three weeks.

  With all my love,

  Swanny

  I didn’t go home for Christmas. I kept thinking of Cary and her treachery. She was more on my mind than Daniel was. I remembered the way she was always telling me how good-looking Daniel was.

  ‘He’s so good-looking, Ann!’ as if she was surprised such a man should have fallen to my lot. And later, when she was visiting us and he, perhaps, had left the room for a moment, ‘He’s so good-looking,’ with a sigh, as if his good looks were too much for her, as indeed they proved to be.

  But ‘He’s so good-looking!’ as if there was nothing else to him. Perhaps there wasn’t, though during those years when we were together he had seemed sensitive and thoughtful, a good listener, witty sometimes, a man who laughed a lot and made others laugh. But Cary, who was nothing if not honest with me when she had succeeded, even explained her unforgivable theft with the same excuse.

  ‘He was so good-looking, Ann.’

  She used the past tense. I noticed this particularly. It was as if his looks had been used for the purpose of capturing her and now they were gone. He looked the same to me, I saw his familiar face with ineffable pain and intense jealousy, but she never mentioned his good looks again, at least not in my hearing.

  They were living in a house he had bought in Putney. An old college friend who had kept in touch wrote and told me that. These days they’d have bought it jointly but it wasn’t so easy to do that fifteen years ago if you weren’t married. Then my friend told me their wedding had taken place and a weight was lifted from my shoulders. I was the reverse of Cleopatra when the messenger told her Antony had married Octavia. It wasn’t that I was less unhappy, less jealous, but the finality of it made me accept. There seemed now no more hope and therefore no more fear, no more waking in the night and thinking, suppose he has left her, suppose he’s trying to find out where I am? No more speculation as to what I’d do if I heard it hadn’t worked out and he was free again. I’ve never been married so I suppose I take an old-fashioned view of marriage. Or else the ones I’ve seen in my own family have always endured. Whatever it is, I think of it as a permanent, indissoluble tie and I saw Daniel and Cary (erroneously, as it happened) as bound to each other for life.

  What was left to me was a dull misery, something not very different from the feeling Swanny had. Or so I supposed. It brought me closer to her, this sense of a shared wretchedness. Perhaps I should go home and share it properly. By then it was February and bitterly cold in the neighbourhood of Boston. Snow lay deep and the airport was closed. There was still plenty of work for me to do but nothing I couldn’t finish by the end of the month. I wrote to Swan
ny, suggesting I might come and stay with her ‘for a few days’ before moving back into the flat. It was a further two weeks before I heard from her and when the letter came it was to welcome me whenever I chose to come, but in a preoccupied way, referring to my proposal with a vagueness quite unusual in her. She had found something to do in the meantime, something to distract her mind. There wasn’t a word in the letter about moving.

  It would be satisfying to say that when Swanny found the diaries she knew at once; she was aware at once that she had discovered something marvellous. And this, in fact, was what she said later on. The various journalists who interviewed her were regularly told how a tremendous excitement took hold of her when she opened the notebook and read the first page and she knew she had come upon a great work of literature.

  The facts about her feelings were otherwise, if her letters to me are a true record, and I believe they are. Two of them came before I left for home and both mentioned the notebooks she had come upon while clearing out. She got to the one lying on the desk in Asta’s room first, her progress being from the top downwards. This was the last diary, the final entry made in September six years before.

  Swanny wrote at the end of a long letter:

  I went through Mor’s room yesterday, turning things out. Did you know there was a ‘secret’ drawer in that black oak table of hers? There’s a sort of frieze of carving all along each side and I noticed one side seemed to stick out more than the other, so I pulled it and it turned out to be a drawer. Possibly Mor herself didn’t know about it as there was nothing in it but a really ancient photograph, sepia of course, and looking as if it had been taken before Mor was even born. A remarkably ugly fat woman in a crinoline, scowling furiously at the camera!

  There was a notebook lying on her desk. Of course I looked inside and when I saw her handwriting hope sprang up quite wildly. I actually thought I might find something vital inside, something about who I was. At the same time I was rather reluctant to read it, it seemed like a private thing, but I did read one page and then I saw the date was 1967, so that was no use.

  Without exactly reading the rest, I could see it was a diary. It made me feel awfully guilty, Ann. I thought, poor darling, did we make her feel out of things, Torben and I? We were so wrapped up in each other that perhaps we excluded her, so that she used to go upstairs and put her thoughts down in the notebook …

  The second letter was much shorter. I had to wait until I got home for a full account of her tidying the coachhouse and her discovery there. In the letter she wrote only:

  I have found a great mass of notebooks Mor seems to have used as diaries. Mor keeping a diary, who would have imagined it? I counted them and there are sixty-three. They are all written in Danish and the first one begins before I was born in 1905!

  They were all damp and bent and spotted with mould. But there must be literally hundreds of thousands of words, great thick notebooks full of words on both sides of the page. Isn’t it the most extraordinary thing?

  The phone rang while I was getting ready to go to dine in Roderick Road. It was Paul Sellway. For a moment I had to think who this was. I said I hadn’t expected him to answer my question.

  He seemed taken aback, then said quite reasonably, ‘Why did you ask it then?’

  ‘Something to say, I suppose. It’s always rankled a bit with me, I mean that my mother didn’t teach me Danish. There must be some unconscious resentment that has to find outlets. Anyway, did they?’

  ‘Did they what?’

  ‘Teach you Danish?’

  ‘No, they didn’t, I’m afraid. My mother couldn’t speak it and my grandmother wasn’t allowed to. My mother bullied her rather. She was always telling her that if you lived in England you should be English.’

  He was silent for a moment and I was trying to think of something to say when he said, ‘But I do speak it and—well, read and write it and all that. It’s my job to, I mean, it was what I studied at university.’

  ‘I thought you were a doctor.’

  ‘Not of medicine.’ He laughed. ‘That’s my mother, telling people I’m a doctor when what she means is a D.Phil. She’d prefer me to be a GP. I teach at London University. Scandinavian languages and literature. And that brings me to why I’m ringing you. I had a feeling you wanted help with those diaries, the ones that aren’t yet published. The tone of your letter, it sounded wistful, I suppose that’s what it was. But maybe I’m quite wrong.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no, you’re not wrong.’

  We made an arrangement to meet the following week. He said to come to dinner but I wouldn’t do that. His wife would be there, or I guessed she would, and though I hadn’t any wish to un-marry him, though I bore Mrs Sellway no ill-will, I had had too many experiences of being the unmarried third, the odd one out, at meals with married couples. In a way, I was about to play that role this evening. He said he would come to Willow Road where, after all, the diaries were.

  I asked myself why I wanted him to look at the translations and compare them with the diaries, or rather, to check that the missing pages hadn’t been torn out after the translation was made, and I decided it was because I wanted to do Cary’s job for her. I wanted to cut the ground from under her feet. Not out of malice, never that, I was long over that, but simply to be able to present her (by post, if possible) with a fait accompli and thus avoid ever having to see her again.

  Someone said that nothing ever happens to a man but that which is like him. He, whoever he was, was proved wrong that evening. Formal, correct, conventional Gordon lived in a flat with black and purple walls, hung with paintings in pink and purple acrylic of androgynous people that owed their musculature to the figures on the Medici tombs. Low divans were upholstered in silver lamé, the bathroom was full of phalluses faintly disguised as trees or towers or pointing fingers, we ate at a green glass table off black bone china and Aubrey draped over our laps black napkins printed with the face of Michelangelo’s David.

  The theme was continued in his clothes, black velvet skipants, a T-shirt that was a collage of Pre-Raphaelite faces. But Gordon wore what I was sure must be his usual summer gear, grey flannels, a white shirt and dark tie, and a garment I hadn’t seen on anyone for twenty years, a sleeveless V-necked knitted pullover. Dinner was wonderful and the wine spectacular. If I hadn’t drunk rather a lot of it I probably wouldn’t have asked a question that might have been taken as a reproach.

  ‘Why did you never go to see her?’

  I expected him to say she was only a great-aunt, they’d had no contact since his grandfather’s death, perhaps even that he didn’t know her precise address. He looked puzzled.

  ‘But I did. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘You went to Willow Road? You saw Swanny?’

  He looked at Aubrey and Aubrey just lifted his shoulders, smiling.

  ‘I suppose I thought you must know, I mean that she’d have told you.’ If you had heard him speaking and not been able to see him you’d have thought from his pedantry, his precision and what Asta would have called his old-maidishness that he was at least fifty. He gave a little dry cough. ‘Let me see, I called the first time about a year ago. It was the height of summer, wasn’t it, Aubrey? A woman came to the door, I suppose it was the housekeeper, I saw her at the funeral, but she wouldn’t let me in. She said Mrs Kjær wasn’t well but she’d tell her I’d called.’

  ‘Wasn’t well’ was, no doubt, a euphemism. That would have been one of Swanny’s days for being her other self, the shuffling carpet-slippered persona with the wrinkled stockings and the knitting bag. It was understandable that Mrs Elkins hadn’t let him in.

  ‘I tried again the next week. Of course I was anxious to see her for herself, you can understand that, but I also wanted to ask her the questions I’ve asked you. But I was turned away again and I must confess—well, I wouldn’t say I was offended, but I came to the inescapable conclusion I wasn’t welcome. And then a very odd thing happened, didn’t it, Aubrey?’

  ‘I t
ook the call. I was amazed.’

  ‘Aunt Swanny phoned me. I’d left my number with the housekeeper that first time. She said she was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me on those previous occasions but she was better now and would I come to tea?’

  ‘It seemed such an appropriate thing,’ Aubrey said, ‘a great-aunt inviting one to tea. What other meal could it rightly be?’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I went, and we had a splendid tea, very old-fashioned and with cress sandwiches. I had to work quite hard at concealing from her that I hadn’t read the diaries. She said she’d made a kind of rough family tree herself and she’d look it out and send it to me.’

  ‘But she never did,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘No, she never did. And now we come to the curious part.’ Gordon’s eyes twinkled. I half-expected him to ask me if I was sitting comfortably. ‘She phoned and invited me to go with her on what she called a voyage of discovery. Of course I said yes and could I bring my friend? You see, Ann, if Aubrey were my girlfriend or my wife (or my boyfriend or my husband, depending on how you regard it) I would have asked. We like to take things for granted and make other people take things for granted, don’t we, Aubrey?’

  He nodded, but smilingly, very laid-back. All the earnestness was Gordon’s.

  ‘So I said I’d like to bring my friend who is a man and with whom I share my home and she said fine, or something like that, and on the appointed day we went round and called for her. She had said a taxi but we thought going in Aubrey’s car would be much nicer.’

  ‘Going where?’ I said.

  ‘To this house in Hackney. It was something of an adventure, I can tell you. She said it was the house where she was born and her parents lived and I must say we were impressed because it was quite big. Of course it was divided into flats and very much—well, bedizened, wasn’t it, Aubrey? We all went in and she talked to this man who had the ground floor and who seemed to be a sort of caretaker for upstairs as well. And there was some story about a ghost which none of us took very seriously. And she seemed satisfied and we went home again.’