Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  The girls will stay with Mrs Housman. It wouldn’t be right to keep them away from school. I should have written, the girls will stay with Mrs Housman if Rasmus hasn’t quarrelled with her husband by that time. He goes about telling everyone he has swindled him and I just hope it won’t reach Mr Housman’s ears before the 12th when we go away.

  I’ve bought two new dresses for the trip, a Chanel two-piece in blue-and-black charmeuse and a blue and violet tea-gown with lilac and black velvet scarf sleeves. Everything is blue and black this year and luckily those colours look good on me. I have a new pair of shoes in black patent with Louis heels and a double instep strap, a style I like better than any other. Both dresses are very short. I never thought the day would come when I would wear skirts that show eight inches of leg.

  This morning when Emily went downstairs she found Bjørn lying dead and cold in the scullory. Poor old dog, he had a good life and a long one for his breed. Rasmus actually wept when I told him, he who hardly ever shows feeling for anyone—except, of course, for Mogens—cried real big wet tears for a dog.

  ‘No one would call you a Great Dane, that’s for sure,’ I said to him.

  March 20th, 1921

  Harry has told me a surprising thing. We had intended to go for a drive to Kew Gardens but it was pouring with rain, so instead we went to a theatre matinée. It wasn’t a good play and I remember scarcely anything of it these few days later. The remarkable thing was that I was able to persuade Harry to take a ticket for himself and sit with me. We found we had exactly the same feelings about this terrible play, wanting to laugh at the sentimental parts and yawn at the long speeches. Most plays seem to be about the war or about what happened afterwards, bereaved parents and crippled men and girls left to be old maids because there are no young men to marry them.

  I did a bit more persuading and got Harry to come and have tea with me in a tea-shop. We talked about Swanny and the girl in the play whose fiancé had been killed and I opened my heart and said, wouldn’t it be terrible if there was no suitable young man to marry Swanny. The fact is, you don’t see many young men, just middle-aged ones and little boys. The fine young men have all been killed.

  I look back to the top of this page and see I wrote that Harry told me a surprising thing. I seem to be a long time getting round to what he did say. We’d got on to the subject of the English hating foreigners and he said that we were lucky having a name which sounded English even though it was Danish. Harry said he’d had a German name, his grandfather was a German who came here back in the 1850s, and though his father was born in London and he was too, he had this premonition of what it would be like having that name if war came. I thought that was clever of him and I said so, remembering Mr and Mrs Cline, who hadn’t changed their name enough and still had trouble.

  Calling himself Duke was very clever. He said he didn’t know any German but he could read, had looked up his name in a German dictionary and found it meant Duke. This was just before he met his wife and when he began courting her he’d changed his name by deed poll.

  Talking of people who can or can’t read, Hansine has had a baby girl. She is to be called Joan. So much for not wanting children!

  Swanny surprised me by asking to see the new baby, so Harry is to drive us over there. We are good friends, Harry and I, and each week that passes the class barrier between us seems to grow a little thinner and weaker. The barrier of sex is another matter. I feel very strongly that even though we strictly speaking are mistress and servant—still, we pay him nothing—he is a man and a strikingly handsome one while I am a woman who, I think I can say, am more aware than most women of the nuances and frissons of sexual tension. If I am frank, I’ll say I am aware of love all around me, in other people and between other people, I know I have never had it and, yes, I long for it. Even at my advanced age, I long for love.

  Well, ungratified, it will soon pass, I suppose. I shall be forty-one this summer but have not a single grey hair. This morning I examined my head very closely, noting that every hair remains the same sandy colour. Poor Rasmus’s beard is quite grey, though the hair on his head is still brown.

  June 23rd, 1923

  Rasmus and I got back from Paris last night. I never write my diary when I’m away on holiday and I miss it. Holidays are strange things. You are supposed to have a change and a rest but what do you do? If you are with someone you can’t talk to because you aren’t interested in the same things the days are very long and pass very slowly. We went to the Louvre and up the Eiffel Tower, we went to Versailles and promenaded in the Champs-Elysées, but all Rasmus cares about is motor cars.

  There are, of course, plenty of these in Paris and practically each one he sees has him craning his neck and staring and pointing out to me all sorts of things about it I don’t understand and don’t want to. Oddly, the only thing we seem to enjoy doing together is shopping for clothes for me. I will say for him, he doesn’t mind how much money he spends.

  Paris has decreed that the chemise is gone and the straight silhouette is in. The waist has gone right down to the hips and belts have disappeared. We went to Patou to get me a straight pleated dress in black and white with a cape and to Chanel for a printed foulard costume. A lot of fashion is based on Indo-Chinese national costume, but I don’t like it, I don’t want to look like a Cambodian peasant. I bought a dress for Swanny in crêpe de Chine with floating panels, a very pale shade of eau-de-nil, which Rasmus thought was for me. He must have some strange ideas if he thinks I’d wear something down to my ankles!

  I missed my diary and I also—oh, how much more!—missed Harry. All the time I was out with Rasmus I kept thinking how different it would be if Harry were my companion, how we would talk and laugh and share things. I thought how we would want to see the same things, for we are both fond of paintings, especially paintings of people, and how we would enjoy the wonderful food. We both like large delicious meals that go on and on. Rasmus eats to live.

  Still, I shall see Harry tomorrow and I shall ask his advice. Rasmus is the proper person to ask but I know he’ll only say to suit myself, he won’t care. A letter was awaiting me from Benedicte, asking if I would spare Swanny to go and stay with them. She isn’t talking about weeks but months and suggests six months. I’m not sure I can bear to be parted from her for so long but I shall ask Harry what he thinks.

  April 12th, 1924

  Rasmus is jubilant. Today he heard that he has been granted something called the Cadillac concession for the British Isles. This means apparently that he and only he can sell Cadillac motors in this country. Well, he and Mr Cline that he’s gone into partnership with can sell them. Rasmus has fallen out thoroughly with Mr Housman who he says has swindled him out of thousands.

  They intend to open a large showroom in the King’s Road at Chelsea. The next thing I suppose will be that I’ll be asked to leave Padanaram and move to Cheyne Walk or some such place, which I shall certainly refuse to do. I’ve learned to stick up for myself a bit more since those days before the war when he could announce we were moving in a month’s time and I had to make the best of it.

  One instance of how I’ve asserted myself happened yesterday when he informed me of the summer holidays we’d be taking. Two weeks at Bognor Regis, wherever that may be, with the girls and two weeks in Brussels for us. I don’t want to go to Brussels, whatever would I do there for a whole fortnight alone with him? We had a terrible quarrel, one of our worst, and of course Marie had to overhear it and start crying.

  I could have killed Rasmus. He sat her on his knee and hugged her—and her a great girl of thirteen—and said that if he couldn’t stand life with Mor any longer would she come and live with him and be his little housekeeper. I screamed at him not to talk like that to the children. The worst was when Marie said if that happened would Mor go and be married to Uncle Harry.

  She is much too old to say things of that sort. You could understand it if she were six. Rasmus had her on his lap and her cheek pressed against his bea
rd and I could see him smirking over the top of her head.

  ‘So Mor’s going to marry the chauffeur, is she?’ he said, and then, to me, ‘You see what you’ve done, going about alone with that man.’

  He doesn’t mean it, though. He knows I wouldn’t misbehave myself. I wish I could, I want to, but it’s no use. Perhaps Harry wants to and feels the same, that it’s no use, that we aren’t those sorts of people. He kisses my hand sometimes, that’s all. But I won’t go away alone with Rasmus any more, not to be abroad somewhere thinking of Harry all day long and how if the world was ordered differently it might be him walking by my side.

  Mrs Duke, Harry’s wife, has had another child, another girl. That makes four girls they have. When he told me I felt myself grow pale, I felt a shiver as the colour was drawn out of my face, but I nodded and smiled and said congratulations and how nice. The truth is I am jealous, I am jealous of the woman who has Harry’s children. I would like Harry’s child myself but to write that down makes me faint and sick with longing.

  June 2nd, 1924

  Swanny has gone to Denmark. She left this morning on the boat in the care of Mrs Bisgaard. Dorte Bisgaard is going to be married to some very rich aristocratic Danish boy, so of course the wedding can’t take place from the Bisgaards’ common ordinary house in West Heath Road. What nonsense it all is! Still, I’m glad to let Swanny go in the keeping of a thoroughly trustworthy person.

  This will be Swanny’s first time as a bridesmaid. There are to be six of them, all dressed in duck-egg-blue silk jersey with overskirts of turquoise satin. I had to persuade Swanny to agree, she insisted she would be so much taller than the other girls she would look ridiculous. Of course, she never could, but she is so modest, too modest.

  Mrs Bisgaard will take her straight to Ejnar and Benedicte and she will leave for the wedding from there. I don’t want her staying in different houses, I want to know where she is. The fact is, I wish it were she getting married to a rich handsome man who would look after her.

  This house feels dead without her, all the rooms lifeless and stale. But I’m alive all right. I’m a live thing in a dead room.

  March 16th, 1925

  We are all recovering from Knud’s wedding. This was Swanny’s second time as a bridesmaid and I don’t want there to be a third. Superstition is very foolish and I’m not superstitious but just the same I can’t help thinking of those words, Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride.

  Maureen threw her bouquet for Swanny to catch, a custom I’ve never come across before but which apparently means that the girl who catches it will be the next to marry. Of course she is not yet twenty and she has her admirers. That young man who was so keen on her in Denmark, the one she met at the party after Dorte’s wedding, bombards her with letters. He’s a Dane and very suitable but the one big drawback is he wants her to go to some place in South America with him. They are to marry and set sail immediately for Santiago or Asunción, I forget which. Swanny sensibly says to wait and see. She writes back but not very often and not at great length.

  April 16th, 1927

  I am a grandmother. I don’t feel or look any different and I certainly don’t feel anything for the baby. We went to see him and his mother this morning. He is exactly like Maureen, a pudgy-faced plain child, but Knud is no beauty either. They are going to call him John Kenneth.

  The men went downstairs to celebrate by drinking, what Knud calls ‘wetting the baby’s head’, and the moment they were gone Maureen began telling me every detail of the birth, how terrible it was and how long it went on. I cut her short. I said there was nothing new in that, we all had babies—except those unfortunate ‘surplus’ women, of course, whose fiancés died in the war—and we all went through much the same. I reminded her I’d had five, not to mention the two I’d lost by miscarriage, and she couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.

  The awful flat they live in must be her choice. But perhaps not. Knud has nothing in common with me, nor his father for that matter. The funny thing is that he is more English than the English and it’s a well-known fact they all love to live in houses while Europeans prefer apartments. Still, people aren’t consistent, I ought to know that.

  Now the evenings are light Harry has begun taking me out again after dinner. There is something wrong with the Mercedes, so Rasmus said we could take the Cadillac. I don’t sit in the back any more but up in the front next to Harry. It’s odd how this began. I used to start in the back and then, once we’d stopped to look at something or go for a walk somewhere, I’d get back into the front seat. But the day before yesterday I was about to get into the back when I realized I was only doing this for fear of the neighbours seeing and talking. Well, I was ashamed of myself. When have I ever cared what people thought? So I shook my head and Harry seemed to know at once, to read my thoughts as he often does, and immediately he opened the passenger door for me. We have never done anything wrong and never will. Evil to him who evil thinks, is what I say.

  He laughed when I said I didn’t much care for being a grandmother and surprised me by telling me his eldest wants to get married, so it may not be long before he catches up with me. She is only sixteen, born in 1911 and born a bit sooner than she should have been, I think. For some reason I like the idea of our being grandparents together.

  We went to see Somerset Maugham’s The Letter at the Playhouse. Gladys Cooper is in it and I always like her, so beautiful, as actresses should be, but a silly story about a woman who shot a man who was trying to rape her. Only he was really her lover and she killed him because she found out he had a Chinese mistress.

  Afterwards, though it was late and dark, we drove to Hampstead and walked about on the Heath. These days our drives get shorter and our walks or expeditions or meals together or visits to theatres and concerts get longer. I know what has happened and he knows, though we never say. He is courting me and I am courting him but with no possibility of kisses or even an arm round a waist, no eventual coming together, nothing beyond what we have, the meeting of eyes across a table, a shared burst of laughter, and my hand tightly held in his.

  November 2nd, 1929

  Swanny started her job today, very much against my wishes. But I have set down my feelings exhaustively and mean to say very little more about it. Torben Kjær would marry her tomorrow if she would have him. Then there is that young man who is some sort of cousin of Maureen’s. He’s mad about her, he is always on the telephone. If she prefers walking to Hampstead every morning to take an old lady’s dog out and read trashy novels to her, I suppose she must do it. She is grown up. Rasmus, of course, doesn’t care what she does except that he is rather pleased not to have to pay for her clothes any more. The pitiful amount she earns will just about cover that.

  Looking back, I see I have forgotten to set down that Knud and Maureen have another child. A boy called Charles was born last Monday. And Harry’s eldest is expecting a baby. She’s the same age as I was when I had Mogens but, perhaps more to the point, the same age as Marie and I see Marie as a child still.

  The New York market crash will affect Rasmus’s business, he says. I don’t understand how but I suppose he knows. All sorts of dire things are threatened, the loss of this concession of his, the possibility of our moving out of this house to somewhere smaller. He told me this evening that Mr Cline had swindled him out of thousands.

  I am going to write it once and never again. I will write it and never even read it again—but when do I re-read this diary?

  I am in love with Harry. I shall be fifty next year and I am in love for the first time. What will become of us, he and I? The sad thing is that nothing will. We shall go on just the same.

  22

  IF THIS WERE my story I should chronicle in some detail the progress of my love. Our conversations would be recorded, but those concerned with Asta left out. I would note our first kiss and our first love-making. Instead, a précis of all that must suffice. It will have to be enough to say that I soon discovered, if I didn’
t know it already, how wrong I’d been to tell Cary I was too old to have a lover and how foolish to tell myself that my capacity for love had been burnt out in the years with Daniel.

  Cary herself I realized I must no longer neglect. It was two weeks since I had slept at my flat, for I had been dividing my time between Willow Road and Paul’s house in Hackney, but I’d gone back there several times to retrieve messages from the answering machine. Cary’s voice issued from it every time, on increasing levels of hysteria. She sounded extremely relieved when at last I called her back.

  ‘Oh, it’s wonderful to be actually speaking to you and not that bloody machine! I kept thinking I must have done something, I mean something more than what I’ve done, if you see what I mean. Listen, will you come with me to see Roper’s house?’

  A strange thing had happened. I found that I no longer disliked her. She came to Willow Road on a Saturday morning, dressed up defiantly, as if it were important to prove to me more than to any other that her youthfulness had survived the years. And perhaps, in the light of what I’d said to her, it was important.

  She had leggings on, the kind that were first designed for skiing, with an instep strap, a bright blue tunic tightly belted and a kind of tasselled poncho. But her expression was anxious. Her eyes were strained. I understood that when I said I’d forgiven her I was lying but I wouldn’t be lying now. We’d been friends once. Then into our late youth Daniel had intervened. It seemed to me that something had happened to wipe away those years and this was the old Cary and, come to that, the old me, in a way made young again as she would wish.

  I kissed her. She drew back as if in recoil but then, as we walked into Swanny’s sitting room, she caught up with me and kissed my cheek. I must have been slow on the uptake that day, for it took me quite a long time to realize what had happened, why I liked her again and no longer resented her. We were in Hackney, Cary and I, exploring the Ropers’ house, walking through the rooms where Lizzie had lived and died, when, quite suddenly, I understood.