Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

‘I said, I’m afraid I don’t know but whatever it is it’s worth it, and he laughed and I laughed and it was all right.’

  She was a changed woman. She’d become a professional. Daily she worked on the diaries, the fifty-three notebooks as yet unpublished. She had frequent conferences with Margrethe Cooper and lunches with her publishers. She bought an electronic typewriter with a memory. Her reading matter, which had formerly been the better kind of romantic fiction and the so-called quality magazines, now became famous diaries: Pepys, The Paston Letters, Fanny Burney, Kilvert, Evelyn and The Journal of a Disappointed Man.

  Two afternoons a week a trained secretary came to deal with the post. Swanny was getting two letters a week from readers in the spring of 1979, but an average of four a day by the end of that year. Sandra, her secretary, kept a complicated filing system for Asta alone: a section for Swanny’s agent—she had acquired an agent that year—and one for film and television approaches and option agreements, a section for foreign publishers, a whole section to itself for her American publisher, others for readers’ letters, artists’ illustrations, paperback cover designs, newspaper and magazine reviews, engagements.

  She began to be invited to open events, present prizes, judge competitions, give talks, speak at literary luncheons. But that was in the future. In 1979, with Asta looking very pretty in all the bookshop windows and whizzing up the non-fiction bestseller list until in April it stood at number one, most invitations that came to her were from newspapers and magazines asking for interviews. At that time, I believe, she never said no. After a lifetime of seldom talking about herself, she relished the opportunity of telling the world, as well as how she found the diaries and realized what they were, what she liked to eat, to drink, to wear, where she went on holiday, what she did in the evenings, what she read, watched on television and who was her favourite media personality. And, of course, she talked about Asta.

  There was never a word in any of these ‘profiles’ to indicate that she might have been anything other than the daughter, and the favourite daughter, of the author of the diaries. While for quite a long time she’d been in the habit of referring to Asta by her Christian name or, when talking to me, as ‘Mormor’ or ‘your grandmother’, it was now always ‘my mother’ to the newspapers and on the television. Of course, a lot of these feature articles were about Westerby family life, which magazine readers were supposed to find perpetually interesting, and perhaps did, and Swanny complied enthusiastically with all demands for reminiscence and anecdote. Her stories were full of ‘my mother this …’ and ‘my father that …’ and ‘my brothers went to so-and-so …’ and ‘when my sister was born …’ When Volume Two, A Live Thing in a Dead Room, was published, the one that began with the diary of 1915, she talked on radio about the doll’s house that her father had made for her sister, giving the explanation that she was by then much too old for such a toy.

  The result of that was that Woman’s Own sent a photographer round to my flat where Padanaram by then was housed in the room on the mezzanine floor. She took pictures of the inside and outside of it and alongside them the magazine ran an interview with Swanny (dressed in blue tweed with a blue felt hat) talking about Asta in the First World War and the death of Mogens o.k.a. Jack on the Somme. Or, rather, in a hospital in Le Havre, two days after being carried off the battlefield by Uncle Harry.

  It was at about this time that Swanny’s way of talking about herself and her family subtly changed. Whether this had anything to do with the publication of the second set of diaries I didn’t know. Certainly no connection was apparent. But there seemed no explanation for this new oddity of behaviour.

  She was seventy-six. I don’t mention this because I think what was happening to her was anything like what Torben alleged happened to Asta, I don’t think she was growing senile. She was seventy-six but she began saying she was seventy-seven. Whenever there was something in the paper about the diaries, and there constantly was, her age would be given as seventy-seven—and this, moreover, in the summer before her seventy-sixth birthday at the end of July.

  There was another thing. Swanny was by now in Who’s Who where her parents were given, of course, as Rasmus Westerby and Asta Kastrup, her place of birth as London and her date of birth as July 28th. But when she gave an interview to an astrologer for a women’s magazine she said she had been born under the zodiacal sign of Taurus, which spans the end of April to three-quarters of the way through May.

  At first I put all this down to journalistic inaccuracy. They had got it wrong, as they often do. Then I was shown the jacket copy—a potted biography plus sample quotes from past reviews—for the paperback edition of A Live Thing in a Dead Room. It said that Swanny had been born in 1904.

  ‘No, I don’t want to correct it,’ she said when I asked her.

  It could be easily done, I said. That was why they sent her the copy, for her approval or otherwise.

  ‘I don’t suppose they’d change it.’ She had a shifty look which I couldn’t remember seeing there before.

  ‘Swanny, of course they would.’

  ‘I said to myself when I started all this with Mor’s diaries, I said, never lie about your age. It’s so terribly undignified pretending to be younger than you are and I never have.’

  ‘No, you’re pretending to be older than you are. That’s not undignified, that’s absurd.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter very much when you get to my age, does it?’ Swanny said with a sublime lack of logic. ‘It’s just that one tries to be honest. Honest and open in all one’s dealings, that’s the way Mor brought us up and I’ve tried to live by it.’

  I didn’t even try to stop myself laughing. She looked injured. ‘Saying you were born in May 1904 is honest, is it?’

  ‘They twist things, these newspapers.’

  I couldn’t think what she was up to. A few weeks later I saw she had told the Sunday Express that the brother she lost in the First World War had died at Argonne in 1918. If the journalist interviewing her had bothered to look this up in Asta she would have seen she had got it wrong by a couple of hundred miles and two years.

  The explanation most readily available was, in my cousin John’s phrase, that she was losing her marbles. He rang up to tell me so. He and his brother, perhaps envious of Swanny’s distinguished place in popular letters, had appointed themselves guardians of our Uncle Mogens/Jack’s memory. At some point, perhaps when Asta was moving in with Swanny after Morfar’s death, they had got hold of the letters Jack wrote to her from France. Very likely she just handed them over. She was the last person to be sentimental about a dead son’s letters home. With an Introduction by John and some bits of prose to link them, John and Charles had tried to get these letters published. They were climbing, so to speak, on the rollicking wagon first set in motion by Swanny. But their efforts were in vain. No publisher wanted them and considering poor Jack wrote on the lines of ‘I am well and hope things at home are still tip-top,’ I can’t say I was surprised.

  John wrote to the Sunday Express, asking for a correction, but they didn’t print one and they didn’t use his letter. The journalist had recorded her interview with Swanny and I’ve no doubt when she played it back she got her subject’s clear voice uttering in no uncertain terms that her brother had died at Argonne in the last months of the Great War.

  For once, I agreed with John about something. I agreed that Swanny was—well, the word I used to him was ‘confused’. She had been doing too much, swept up as she had been into the promotional machine that publishers insist is required even to sell a bestseller. Her arthritis had begun once more to trouble her. I was relieved when she told me she felt in need of a rest and would be going away on a cruise with the relatives from Roskilde.

  20

  PAUL PHONED TO SAY he had made his comparisons between Asta’s original notebook, Margrethe Cooper’s translation and the published Asta and could we meet to discuss his findings.

  I wasn’t really disappointed that these were practi
cally non-existent. It pleased me that he had done it all so fast, in four days, and I knew that he must have worked on the diaries every evening. There was no sign in his face or manner of having been offended by what he’d read but I didn’t postpone what I felt I had to say.

  ‘I wish my grandmother had been less harsh and insulting about yours. When I think of the things she wrote it makes me wince. I feel I ought to apologize to you on her behalf.’

  ‘Then I’ll apologize to you for all the times my grandmother was intrusive and awkward and broke the china.’

  I said it couldn’t happen to many people, to find out precisely what one of their forebears thought about the other’s forebear, an exact contemporary.

  ‘Do people write more frankly in a diary than they speak?’

  ‘Yes, if they think no one’s going to see it.’

  ‘You believe a woman writes down her whole life and hopes no one will ever read it?’

  ‘Asta did. She not only did that, she threw away what she’d written.’

  ‘There are ways and ways of throwing things away,’ Paul said. ‘If you really want to destroy something it’s not too difficult. Are you sure she didn’t want it found?’

  We were in Willow Road. I’d gone home once to fetch some clothes and come back again. Like Swanny, after she had found the diaries, I was forgetting about selling the house. Perhaps the diaries had that effect. They changed one’s tastes; one wanted to be where they were, under the same roof with them.

  Paul laid the notebook, the manuscript and his own copy of Asta on the table in front of us. There were markers inserted between the pages but they were there only to point up a line here and a line there he thought interesting or significant. The translation Margrethe Cooper had made was the notebook word for word, the notebook with the five pages gone. Asta in first edition was the Cooper translation in print, in no way cut, in no way augmented.

  His first marker was at the entry for November 2nd, 1905, the day after Morfar came home from his travels in Denmark. It could have nothing to do with Roper, he said, but it interested him that Asta had set down her husband’s remarks on the new baby looking like neither of her parents. There was more too, in the following February. Paul had marked that as well. Why did Asta protest so much about her fidelity and go on for a whole page about what she thought of women who were false to their marriage vows? Presumably she wasn’t, so why labour the point?

  That was the cue for me to tell him about Swanny and the question which had haunted her last years, which hadn’t stopped or become quiescent, as I now believed, with the discovery and publication of the diaries but persisted until a few years before she died when, after reading a ‘famous trial’, she came to her curious conclusion.

  Paul listened attentively to all this. He has a remarkable way of listening. He gives you his whole attention but without eye contact, his head resting on one hand, a small frown of concentration on his face, and he attends in absolute silence. It’s interesting to watch someone who is so thin and even athletic, a vigorous man, with at the same time a capacity for keeping entirely still for long periods of time, still, silent, listening.

  I told him the whole Swanny tale. Sometimes, when you’re telling a very long story, you have the feeling you should hurry, gloss over some bits, synopsize others, but with Paul it’s not like that. If he wants to know he’ll listen—if necessary for hours. It didn’t take me hours, no more than fifteen minutes. He asked one question.

  ‘What put her on to doubting she was Asta’s child in the first place?’

  ‘Didn’t I say? She got an anonymous letter, one of those things with the words printed.’

  It’s hindsight that makes me say his face changed, that he turned pale or became very still or something. I noticed nothing at the time. I went on with my story and when I came to the end I told him who I thought Swanny believed she was.

  Swanny made a lot of money out of the diaries. They had worldwide sales and by 1985 were published in twenty languages, not including English and Danish. A film was made, rather awful but lucrative, and of course the adaptation of Asta in five parts, beginning with Rasmus’s courtship of Asta and his learning of the existence of the dowry and ending with Asta and Uncle Harry meeting soon after Jack’s death (Anthony Andrews with a beard, Lindsay Duncan in a red wig and Christopher Ravenscroft in army uniform), won an award as best television serial of the year 1984. It was shown on PBS in the United States as well as all over Europe.

  She made a lot of money and she spent it prudently, as she had always spent money. Torben might as well have still been alive, it might as well have been his earnings. But she was sensible in the way she used some of it to make sure she was properly looked after. Mrs Elkins who, for a long while after Torben died, had come in for a few hours three times a week, was now appointed housekeeper and though she didn’t sleep at Willow Road was there all day and every day except Sundays from nine till five. A girl from Kilburn came over twice a week to help. However, her wisest move was in taking on a nurse-companion to be with her every night from nine in the evening until Mrs Elkins came in the morning.

  Not that she was aware how strange she had become. There was never a sign that she was conscious of a growing mental disturbance. The nurse was there because Swanny’s arthritis, apparently in remission for several years, had returned and with particular sharpness and agony in her neck, back and hands. Also she slept badly, lying wakeful for long hours of every night. If she had to get up, and she usually had to, she was afraid of falling as she crossed the few yards of floor between her bed and the bathroom.

  She had rapidly declined from her position as busy, distinguished editor of the diaries. Before Christmas she was still touring, still speaking at literary lunches and giving interviews. By the following June she had grown old, in mind as well as body.

  The contrast between her old age and Asta’s was marked but she never pointed this out. She never said (as she might once have done), ‘Look at me, and just think what Mor was like at my age.’ She had ceased entirely to refer to Asta as ‘Mor’ or ‘mother’. It was now always ‘Asta’. The people in the diaries were no longer ‘my brother’, ‘my great-aunt’, but spoken of by their first names. And she herself was not a Dane any more but English. She had become someone else.

  Privately, at home, that is. With me. With the various people who worked for her. To her agent, her publisher, the world out there to whom she was Asta’s daughter she remained just that. It was as if she had, late in life, mastered the handling of a split personality. It took its toll, of course, it drove her further down the slope into madness.

  It wouldn’t be putting it too strongly to say Asta had driven her mad. Our need to know our own origins is deepseated, is at the root of personality. Most of us have no difficulty about this. We grow up knowing, taking for granted, in an absolute unshakeable certainty that this man was our father, this woman our mother, and these other people, therefore, our ancestors. Swanny did that too and lived with this certain knowledge until she was almost an old woman. Then this part of her life, its foundation in fact, was cut away, as a spade swiftly digs a pit and makes an abyss. Asta built the foundations and Asta dug the hole she fell into. No doubt, she didn’t know what she was doing. If her own mother had told her she was adopted and refused to say more Asta would have snapped her fingers at her and got on with her life.

  When Swanny was her other self she spoke differently. Her normal voice was that of her Hampstead neighbours, cultivated, so-called ‘educated’, English. But Danish had been her first language, the language Asta spoke to her from babyhood, and like all Danes, those great polyglots, there were one or two English words she pronounced in a way that revealed her cradle tongue. All Danes say ‘lidd’l’ for ‘little’ and Swanny was no exception. But in her alter ego she didn’t pronounce it like that. Her smooth rounded vowel sounds became flat and she dropped the ultimate g from present participles. ‘Everything’ and ‘nothing’ had a k added to their fin
al syllable. She was speaking with a working-class north London accent and it sounded, embarrassingly, as if some of her remarks were a deliberate send-up of Mrs Elkins.

  Fortunately, none of the people with whom she was associated in the publishing, marketing and publicizing of the diaries ever saw or heard her when she was like this. Sandra quickly took on the role of buffer between Swanny and the world outside. She became adept at watching Swanny’s moods and if the other self was in the ascendant, cancelled interviews, book signings, meetings with publishers, or whatever it might be. Swanny, after all, was by now a very old woman. In 1985 (or 1984, depending from which viewpoint you looked at it) she had become eighty. Saying she was tired or ‘not so well today’ was a perfect excuse and one nobody was likely to argue about.

  So her other self was shown to me, to Sandra, to Mrs Elkins, and to the two nurses, Carol and Clare, and only to us. Perhaps we were all naturally discreet. For my part, I told no one of Swanny’s personality split. If the others talked, it never reached the press. As far as the rest of the world knew, Swanny Kjær continued to be the ‘remarkable’, ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’—and all the other adjectives newspapers use about an old person who isn’t bedridden and gaga—custodian of the diaries she had always been. When Jane Asher recorded Asta on audiotape, the picture of Swanny on the promotional pamphlet was the photograph beside the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, the last one she was ever to have taken.

  At home, increasingly often, even her appearance was changed. She had always been fastidiously clean and sleek and groomed, taking a shower or a bath twice a day—to Asta’s derision—dressing with formal care, paying great attention to her hair and going to the hairdresser twice a week. Like my mother, she had devoted part of each day to the care of her clothes, and buying new ones was one of the pleasures of her life. Now, on the days when she became her other self, she refused to bath and resisted the attempts of Carol or Clare to get her to do so. She insisted on putting on an old tweed skirt and woollen jersey, though jumpers and skirts were the kind of clothes she had once condemned as sloppy dressing. Her hair was thick and short, the naturally tidy kind, so she untidied it by simply leaving it as it was when she got out of bed. She went bare-legged, her feet thrust into bedroom slippers, and succeeded in looking like the bag lady who pushed her box barrow up Heath Street.