Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘There’s one very like it in the Stockholm art museum,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the same one at first but it’s not. The other hasn’t got the dog and it’s got a second birch tree.’

  I didn’t tell him that Swanny’s couldn’t be the Stockholm painting because it was an original. Torben had been heard to say he wouldn’t have a reproduction on his walls. I’d thought it snobbish and élitist at the time and did so the more now.

  I gave him a drink, said, ‘I thought while you’re here you might like to see some photographs too. There are lots of your grandmother.’

  ‘In maid’s uniform?’

  I was a little taken aback. ‘One is. But I truly think it was more like fancy dress. I mean, my grandmother got your grandmother to wear it just to make a good picture.’

  He burst out laughing. It was very hearty, infectious laughter. I couldn’t help joining in, then saying ridiculously, ‘What makes you laugh?’

  ‘I did my doctoral thesis on Strindberg, with particular attention to his autobiography that’s called The Son of a Servant. He was, you know, and it rankled. My mother wasn’t pleased at my choice of subject.’

  I asked him why.

  ‘My grandmother was in service for a long time, at least twenty years, and she liked talking about it. After all, it was her whole youth. But my mother hated it, she was deeply ashamed of a mother who’d been a servant, and I’m afraid my grandmother played up to it. I mean, she teased her. I was very young but I can just remember that. My grandmother used to go on about having this lovely uniform and starching her caps and putting on a fresh apron to answer the door—all that sort of thing, you can imagine.’

  That reminded me of Swanny’s visit to Joan Sellway, the denials, the cold response. I asked him how he remembered Hansine. Had he been fond of her? Was she the warm motherly creature I pictured and that the diaries seem to confirm?

  ‘I don’t think she was particularly,’ he said. ‘Hindsight tells me she didn’t like children. She lived with us and she and my mother sparred a lot. My grandmother seemed to take pleasure in rubbing my mother up the wrong way, and the reverse was true too. I much preferred my other grandmother. I think I sensed that she treated me more as a person in my own right, not a pawn to be used in grown-up’s games. I suppose, when you say that about her being warm and motherly, you’re thinking of her playing with Mogens and Knud?’

  I was so surprised I came straight out with it. ‘You’ve read the diaries then?’

  ‘Of course. I thought you knew that.’

  ‘Most men when you ask them say, “No, but my wife has.” ’

  ‘I haven’t got a wife. I did once but I haven’t since the first volume of Asta’s diaries was published. Now, please, can we go and look at them?’

  Paul took the diary in both hands and held it in a way that was both reverential and delighted. He was rather like a child clutching the Christmas present he’s long been waiting for. The stains puzzled him and the brown marks on the pages and he shook his head in wonder when I explained where Asta had hidden her books and where they’d been found.

  I brought him a copy of Asta, a pristine first edition. He compared it with the original, confirmed of course that the missing five pages were missing in the printed book and in the translated manuscript, and said that if I wanted a closer and more accurate comparison that would take him a while.

  He didn’t suppose I’d let him take the diary away with him? Just the notebook for 1905?

  An hour earlier I’d have said that was the last thing I’d consider. Now I found myself saying of course he must, there was no other way, I knew the diary would be safe with him. A sensation of Swanny turning in her grave I chose to ignore.

  ‘Does the name Roper mean anything to you?’ I said.

  ‘Brides in the Bath,’ he said promptly. Then, doubting himself, ‘No, arsenic. A poisoner, anyway, a sort of Crippen character.’

  I explained. Or I explained what Cary wanted if not quite what I wanted. Not that I was exactly sure then what that was. I gave him Asta’s Famous Trials paperback. After all, I had two copies now.

  ‘May I take the diaries that cover the next two years as well?’

  In refusing, I knew very well that I was inviting him back to collect them when he had done with Volume One. And, looking at me with a smile, not a smile of resignation, I guessed he knew it too. It’s at this point that I should say he took me out to dinner. But it wasn’t like that, it was a recognition on both our parts that we were hungry, it was past the time at which we usually ate and that there are several restaurants at South End Green. I suppose it would be true to say he suggested it but in the way very old friends might suggest dining together.

  ‘Shall we go out and eat?’

  ‘I’ll get my coat,’ I said.

  Much later that night I sat down to re-read the first part of Asta and I was surprised to find how much it dismayed me. All Asta’s digs at Hansine, her scornful comments, almost a subtext to her narrative, leapt out of the page and pinched me so that I winced. This was the first time I had given any thought as to how Hansine’s descendants might feel about Asta’s unkind remarks. What must Joan Sellway have felt when she saw her mother described as stupid, ‘like a farm animal’, ‘fat and red-faced’, greedy, lazy and less than fit company for her employer?

  If Paul hadn’t told me he had already read the book, I thought how much worse I would be feeling, and I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to whoever might be listening that I’d asked him that clumsy question about his wife reading the diaries. Even so, he would soon come to Asta’s spiteful judgements in the original as well as in Margrethe Cooper’s translation. Somehow that seemed to me to compound the unpleasantness of it. I knew I’d hear from him again because he was a conscientious man but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sent all the papers back with a curt note.

  I sat up a long time that night, browsing about in the diaries, looking for references to Roper, looking for clues to Swanny’s identity and finding only that Asta dwelt rather a longer time than she might have done if she’d had nothing to hide on Rasmus’s questions about the new baby and his remarks on that baby’s appearance. It disquieted me, though. I’ve said I’ve never been married and know nothing much about marriage, but just the same I was almost shocked by the idea of a relationship in which one party could keep such a secret as that from the other. These had been my grandparents, married to each other for more than fifty years, sharing a bed all that time, progenitors of many children. Thinking about it brought me close to the conclusion Swanny had herself perhaps reached towards the end of her life, that Asta had been telling the truth when she recanted and said she made up the story of the adoption.

  So what of the anonymous letter? Torben obviously believed Asta herself had sent it. Asta had snatched the letter when Swanny showed it to her and quickly torn it into pieces which she burnt. So that no one could identify the printing as hers?

  To write such a letter would be a way, albeit a very devious way, of enlightening Swanny as to the truth of her origins. Asta may have decided she wanted Swanny to know before she died and by sending the letter she would avoid the first, impossibly difficult, breaking of the news, and precipitate the two of them immediately into the necessary argument and discussion—a controversy which would give her, Asta, a further chance to view her options: to confess or retract.

  She had, of course, done both.

  19

  TRANSLATING THE DIARIES cost Swanny a lot of money. Once she had started she felt she had to go on and she asked Margrethe Cooper to translate all the ten notebooks Asta wrote between 1905 and 1914.

  Mrs Cooper must have been a busy woman, she was in demand as a translator for three of the Scandinavian languages, not just Danish, and she was that rare linguist who is considered capable of translating both ways. That is, she put English into Danish for Danish publishers and Danish into English for English ones. A Dane married to an Englishman, she had g
rown up, as Swanny herself had, with two cradle tongues and was equally proficient in both of them. Unlike Swanny—as Swanny would have been the first to admit—she had a real feeling for literature and for the rhythms of the languages from which and into which she translated.

  But I hardly suppose she wanted to devote many months of her life, perhaps years, to working on something for what must have seemed like a wealthy woman’s whim. When she began she can’t have dreamed that the translation she made would ever be published or publication be considered. She wasn’t in it only, or even primarily, for the money. However, it wasn’t long before she saw that there was nothing commonplace about the diaries, their style and content were far from that of Torben’s St Petersburg cousin. She went on working on them, she told Swanny, partly because she was fascinated by what Asta had to say and partly because she thought there was a very real chance of their being published.

  This gave Swanny encouragement. She grew excited when she saw the first drafts Margrethe Cooper had made. How she also must have felt when she read Asta’s words at the time of my mother’s birth about Morfar’s rejection of his elder daughter, she said nothing about. Perhaps she was resigned to it after so long. By then, of course, she had already removed the five pages that gave a clue to her own origins.

  Did she ask herself if Morfar knew? There is nothing in the diaries to show that he did and Asta herself seems mystified by his dislike of Swanny. It’s possible, of course, that he sensed somehow, or strongly suspected, she wasn’t his child while finding it impossible to believe Asta could be unfaithful. Swanny’s beautiful looks, that very fairness and height and whiteness of skin, were against her. Where did it come from? Not his brown-skinned, brown-haired family of thick-set peasants, not Asta’s ginger-headed, freckled, stocky forebears, none of them ever attaining even his own height of five feet ten, while Swanny at seventeen was nearly six feet tall. But Asta wouldn’t be untrue to him, Asta wouldn’t deceive him.

  Whether Swanny asked herself all this or not I can’t tell, for she never again spoke to me about her birth and her adoption. There was evidence in her later behaviour that speculation about her origins was still a very important part of her life, but she talked of it no longer. And if she didn’t talk about it to me I doubt if she did so to anyone. Besides, at this time, in the mid-seventies, she was beginning to set up for herself a role and a position that had to be utterly inviolable, that of Asta Westerby’s daughter.

  All her future success was to depend on her being Asta Westerby’s daughter. She was to be the guardian of the diaries and their editor, the keeper of the shrine, the confidante of the living and the spokeswoman for the dead.

  She tried Part I of what became Asta, that is the year 1905, on two English publishers. Both sent rejections, the second one keeping the copy rather longer than the first, that was all. The year was 1976 and The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady had not yet been published, was not to be published for another year. It was by the merest coincidence that Swanny gave her manuscript the title of The Diary of a Danish Lady.

  She didn’t seem upset by these rejections. From the first she had enormous confidence in the diaries and Margrethe Cooper, who had become a friend, supported her. It was she who persuaded the Danish publisher Gyldendal to look at the original, painstakingly photocopied by her on an old Roneo copier, and thus it happened that the diary Asta had written in Danish was first brought to the notice of the public in her native land. Gyldendal published their edition, in a large format and exquisitely illustrated, in 1978. They called it Astas Bog.

  These illustrations were later used in the English edition when Swanny found a London publisher that same year. Nearly half of them were line drawings and watercolours, a Hackney market in the first decade of the century, a fashion plate of a lady in motoring clothes and many others. The rest were family photographs. The cover design was of a medallion containing a photograph of the very young Asta, taken in Stockholm, in Nackströmsgatan, by a photographer called Berzelius. She is in a V-necked dress with a silk patterned insertion and mandarin collar, her hair is tightly drawn back but for a little curly fringe, but the picture isn’t really appropriate for that first diary. Asta may look grown-up but in fact the photograph was taken when she was fourteen, staying with her mother’s cousin and his children Bodil and Sigrid.

  There’s no need for me to describe Asta further. Those who haven’t read it have at least seen it. Those who haven’t seen it have seen its cover picture in newspapers and magazines and the windows of department stores. Swanny, though not a particularly shrewd woman, had the nous to insist on exclusion from the contract she had with her publishers the clause that attempted to provide for the use of this image and others from the book on calendars, tea-cloths, jam pots, bed linen, oven gloves, notelets and crockery.

  No doubt they were amenable because it hardly crossed their minds that the book would sell more than two thousand copies, still less inspire a cult. It was to come out in October, in good time for Christmas. Meanwhile, Swanny was in Copenhagen, the guest of Gyldendal, promoting their edition of Astas Bog. She stayed in an hotel which was a converted warehouse in the newly respectable Nyhavn where, all those years ago, according to one of Asta’s stories, a drunken relative of hers had thrown a beer bottle at someone in a bar and spent the night in a police cell.

  Swanny had a good time in Denmark. In the two or three letters she wrote to me she said she felt as if she had come home, although the truth was that before this the longest time she had ever spent there was that three months during which she met Torben. Since then she and Torben had been back a few times but never for more than two weeks at a stretch. They had scarcely been outside Copenhagen while now she was travelling all over the country, from Aarhus to Odense to Helsingør. Her publishers’ publicity department must have loved her. She was a foreigner but she spoke Danish, she knew Danes and she was willing to go anywhere and do anything. They could put her on television without dubbing or translation. No local paper was too insignificant for her to grant it an interview.

  She visited her cousins or, rather, Torben’s cousins, for her great-aunt Frederikke’s sons had both died childless. She spent a weekend with Torben’s niece and her husband in Roskilde. She went to the theatre and the opera, she visited the castles of Frederiksborg and Fredensborg and Andersen’s house in Odense. She was photographed in Copenhagen, standing beside the statue of Andersen’s Little Mermaid, and it is this picture which has since appeared on the back jacket of every edition of the diaries. Swanny is in a tweed suit and the kind of small felt hat the Queen wears, the inevitable handbag hooked over her left arm. Because of her height and her upright slenderness, because of her good legs and fine ankles and feet in the punishing high-heeled shoes, she looks less than her age. Certainly she looks less than the age she was shortly to tell people she was.

  The letters she sent me were those of a happy woman enjoying herself. That’s a slight exaggeration: a woman learning to be contented, a woman discovering a new potential. Perhaps she realized, as I did, that until now, at the end of it, she had always lived her life in someone else’s shadow. First she was Asta’s, then Torben’s, then Asta’s again. To them she had deferred, she had been obedient and even submissive, the favourite daughter, the good wife, her personal life ruled by them. If they were benevolent despots, they had still kept her in a kind of subjugation. Her mother treated her like a child. Her husband put her on a pedestal and adored her, gave her everything she wanted and expected nothing from her, only that she should be there, but he never consulted her about anything. He never asked her opinion. Even her parties were to entertain his friends and diplomatic contacts. Would Swanny, left to herself, have wanted to spend time with Aase Jørgensen, the professor of maritime history?

  But now she was doing something by herself for herself, of her own free will. Because she wanted to. And she was being honoured for it, deferred to, sought after. She was earning money, something she hadn’t done since before she
married Torben and for a while had a job as companion to an old lady in Highgate, arranging flowers and taking the papillon out for walks.

  The remarkable thing was that she never seemed fazed by any of it. Journalists who interviewed her after Asta first came out persistently asked—and went on asking over the years—if she hadn’t been astounded by the success of the diaries. Could she have imagined such a thing happening ‘in her wildest dreams’?

  ‘As soon as I read the first page I knew this was something special,’ she told the Observer.

  With the Sunday Times she was sharper. ‘What I do find strange is that I knew from the start the diaries would be a bestseller and those publishers I sent the manuscript to didn’t. You’d think their experience would have taught them, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Do you think you’d have been a good publisher yourself then?’

  ‘Women didn’t go into publishing when I was young,’ Swanny said.

  The young women who interviewed her couldn’t believe Swanny had never been to university. Why wasn’t she illiterate? How did she come to read Danish? And so on. Swanny took it in her stride. She told me that the first time she went on the radio in this country it was live and she was nervous, but once the interview began everything came right and she enjoyed herself. Then the interviewer asked her the price of the book. She didn’t know. There was a copy lying on the table between them and she picked it up to look at the front jacket flap, but it was a book club edition and there was no price inside.