Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I wonder what became of her.’

  ‘Of Florence Fisher? I can tell you something of that. We’ve had a whole team of people researching. She never married that chap she was engaged to, no one seems to know why not. When she gave evidence at the trial she was a housemaid with a family called Sumner at Stamford Hill. She never married at all. We’ve got a whole dossier on Florence, you can have a look at it if you like, but it doesn’t tell one much.’

  I asked if she was still alive.

  ‘Well, hardly, Ann. She’d be well over a hundred. She died in 1971 if I remember rightly and I probably don’t, my memory’s like a sieve these days. There’s a great-niece, a sister’s granddaughter, but most of what she said was the old eulogistic stuff, you can imagine, how wonderful auntie was and good and unselfish, all that. She wasn’t always in service. Somehow or other she got the money together to open a tobacconist’s shop and she ran that for years. She did get to be something high up in the Women’s Voluntary Service and had her photograph taken with the Marchioness of Clovenford. The niece insisted on showing me that. The only interesting thing about that, as far as I’m concerned, is that Lady Clovenford’s father-in-law was the first Marquis of Clovenford and the first Marquis of Clovenford was that Attorney General who had been Richard Tate-Memling who prosecuted Roper.’

  ‘I wonder if Florence knew,’ I said and, drawing a deep breath, pointed to the house on the corner. ‘That’s where my friend Paul lives.’

  Cary gave a little scream. ‘Oh, Ann, what a dark horse you are! Why didn’t you say? Can we go and see him? Shall we go and ask him to give us coffee? I could do with some, couldn’t you?’

  Like schoolgirls. Is that where your boyfriend lives? Can I sneak a look at him?

  ‘Where’s this house?’ I said.

  She led me to it reluctantly. We stood on the opposite pavement and I wondered if Paul was watching us. The house had three floors and a basement but otherwise was quite unlike Devon Villa. It was newer, dating from a less gracious time, when dwellings had begun to be mass-produced. The proportions had the characteristic wrongness of many buildings put up in the 1890s. It was cheap and ugly, brown brick with heavy plaster trimmings, a front with a double panel of red-and-green stained glass. But I could see it was more the sort of house Maria Hyde ought to have lived in than the one in which she actually did live.

  We turned back. Paul had seen us and come out into his front garden.

  ‘Isn’t he good-looking!’ Cary said.

  I burst out laughing.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘You can’t have this one,’ I said and I introduced her to Paul and we went into his house.

  23

  IN THE EVENT, there was no danger of another theft on Cary’s part. Paul told me, rather diffidently, that he hoped I didn’t think it unreasonable but he hadn’t much liked her. What was less gratifying to me was his refusal to concern himself any further with the diaries.

  ‘Refusal’ is too strong a word. I would be better to say that he was reluctant. He seemed quite happy to talk about the Roper case, read the Ward-Carpenter and Mockridge accounts and he even got the whole uncut trial for me, in the Notable British Trials series. The Senate Library had it so of course it was available to him. He seemed interested in speculating about Edith’s fate too, what might have become of her and if she had survived. But the diaries, that he had at first been so enthusiastic about, he seemed to have finished with, to have put aside. I had the strange feeling that talking about them had begun to embarrass him. The notebooks he had borrowed he returned to me without a word, and when I suggested he might like to look at those for the 1920s and 1930s he only shook his head and changed the subject. If the diaries had been no more than records left in my possession by an ancestor, this would scarcely have mattered. Falling in love with someone and entering into a new relationship need not mean you must share everything. Paul himself, after all, played golf, Paul played chess, neither of which activities interested me in the least. But the diaries were more than just a family possession to me, more than an heirloom living in a cupboard. I had become their editor, the mantle of Swanny had to a great extent fallen on to my shoulders. I was doing less and less author research and when almost a year had gone by after Swanny’s death, I gave it up altogether.

  The diaries wouldn’t become my whole life, as they had been Swanny’s, but they must inevitably take an important part in it. All those things Swanny had done were now for me to do, discussing new editions with publishers, approving paperback formats, studying illustrations, assessing foreign sales and a host of other matters. It was proposed to issue the diaries that spanned 1935-1944 during the following year, in a simultaneous enterprise by the English publishers and Gyldendal. There was plenty for me to do and, naturally, as one does, I sometimes wanted to talk about what I was doing with the man who was closest to me.

  Paul, who is so warm, so enthusiastic, so generous in spirit, gave me, every time, the gentle brush-off. He was always polite, he was always considerate, but he didn’t intend to talk about those diaries, come what might. I concluded they must bore him. And this, I thought, was maybe quite natural. Wouldn’t they have bored me if they hadn’t been by a person I had known well and about people I knew well? On the other hand, they didn’t bore the millions who bought and read them.

  I ceased to speak of them to him, a difficult prohibition since he would often ask me what I’d done that day and since I wasn’t a housewife or much of a shopper and didn’t see my friends in the daytime, I was often hard put to answer him. I’d been, after all, all day involved with the next set of diaries.

  I didn’t just let it go, I asked him. He hesitated and said he didn’t suppose I wanted to know how he had got on teaching Danish literature to nineteen-year-olds.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I might, if it was funny or different.’

  ‘It’s seldom different and it’s never funny.’

  ‘Yes, well, lots of different and sometimes amazing things happen when I’m talking to Margrethe or Swanny’s editor about the diaries.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, but he said it only because he was kind.

  I stopped telling him when his expression became, not so much glazed or bored, as sad. Yes, sad, and I never guessed why. I should have done, it was staring me in the face, but I never did. I might have done if I’d ever met his mother. Still, I wasn’t the kind of woman who expects her man to take her home to meet his family, especially at my age, with my fiftieth birthday approaching. And Paul never suggested it. He went to see his mother and told me he’d been there and made some comment about her, how she was and what she had been doing, but he never once asked me if I’d feel like coming along too.

  We weren’t exactly living together. I often think that in our society there is a bar to steady relationships sociologists never seem to think about; people own their homes, they have spent a lot of money on them, often they love them: which one in a partnership is to give up the beloved home? It’s not just a matter of money. One may love living in Dulwich and loathe the prospect of Brondesbury while the other couldn’t consider the idea of living south of the river. Paul was very fond of his house in Hackney, I had two homes in and around Hampstead. Which of us was to make the sacrifice?

  At any rate I’d gone as far as to put my flat on the market, though moving none of my furnishings out of it but for the doll’s house. Padanaram now had a room of its own at Willow Road. The removal van came and it was transported up to Hampstead on the very day that Margrethe Cooper showed me her new translation and I read how the original Padanaram had been sold in the early thirties. I was living in Swanny’s house most of the time and, though we stayed with each other and always spent our weekends in one or the other’s home, Paul was still living in Hackney.

  The solution would have been for each of us to sell our houses and buy one jointly, but I had grown to love Willow Road. He loved his house but sometimes talked of selling it. If I stopped
him, or didn’t encourage him, it was because I wondered what it would be like living with a man who was clearly bored (or somehow distressed or upset) by what occupied me for the greater part of every day.

  Cary found someone to write a script for her, liked what she got, appointed a director and set about casting the production which was simply to be called, in the currently fashionable way, Roper. It was to be in three parts, to be transmitted on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday or else weekly. No one had decided that yet.

  The house in Paul’s street was to be the venue and she told me that six people worked on it for three months, getting the appearance and all the period detail right. The lucky householders, who would get everything put back as they had left it or else a house interestingly decorated in the style of 1905, had gone on an extended trip to see their son in New South Wales. Paul and I saw them shooting the scene where Roper comes back for his sovereign case. It was a Sunday morning, very early, and I was staying the weekend with him. Middleton Road, which was usually lined with cars, had been cleared and a hansom cab stood outside the house, drawn by a horse that was too fat and sleek. They hadn’t been able to find a thin, spavined one.

  A little crowd had gathered on the opposite side and we all stood gazing before Paul and I decided we could see it just as well from one of his bedroom windows. The actor playing Roper looked quite like his photograph and even more like Abraham Lincoln than Alfred himself had. When we’d seen him get out of the cab and run up the steps fifteen times and still the director wasn’t satisfied, we gave up and had our breakfast.

  It took the company eight weeks to make the film and when it was done, though not I think before it was edited, Cary produced some very handsome promotional material. This consisted mainly of a large glossy four-page brochure in full colour, mostly showing stills from the production but with a blurb on the back page about the cast and who they were and what they’d done and a lot of acclaim for Cary herself and her director, Miles Sinclair. There was a photograph of Roper with Lizzie and one of Lizzie with Maria Hyde. One showed the baby Edith climbing those stairs and another Florence in her kitchen. There was a cast list and I mention it because it was of importance to what happened later.

  Principally, it was used for the purpose of drumming up foreign sales. It went to Australia and New Zealand, Canada and America, and one of the results was that Cary did sell the production all over the place. Another was a more personal reaction.

  She told me she had had a letter, then a phone call, from an American woman called Lisa Waring. She worked for a television company in Los Angeles and it was her business or the business of her department to select from those on offer foreign (principally British) productions to be transmitted on the Cable Network. At present she was still in California but would soon be coming to this country.

  The name Lisa Waring had seen in the promotional material for Roper was that of one of her great-grandfathers on her father’s side but she had never come across it elsewhere. The few attempts she had made to establish her ancestry on this side of the family had come to nothing because she was never able to trace this man’s origins.

  ‘Which man?’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t say. It’s all a mystery but then again it’s probably not very important.’

  ‘What does she expect you to do about it?’

  ‘She wants to come and see me and show me various papers she’s got.’

  Paul said this sort of thing was bound to happen, wasn’t it, when a drama that had really happened was adapted for television. There would be more of it when Roper went out on the network.

  ‘I don’t suppose I can help her,’ Cary said. ‘If her great-grandfather was a Roper he could only be Arthur because the other brothers either had no children or their children died, like Edward who was killed in the First World War. Arthur had two daughters and one of them could be her grandmother, I suppose. They were born in 1912 and 1914, he says in the memoir.’

  ‘It can hardly be a Roper,’ Paul said. ‘Roper’s quite a common name.’

  I know Cary very well. She shows everything she feels in her face, and I could see in a sudden gravity and an accompanying abstraction that she was afraid for the fate of her production. She was afraid this woman was about to tell her something that would put it in jeopardy.

  She told me a few days later that she had always wondered if something lay in Roper’s past that would explain the nature and the method of Lizzie’s murder. It isn’t everyone who can cut someone’s throat with a single clean blow of a sharp knife. What was there in Roper to negate the normal inhibition that restrains most men from such an act? Where, too, and how had he acquired the skill to do it? If he had done it. If it was Roper.

  Lisa Waring wanted to meet Cary, at her home, at her office, wherever was most convenient. In her usual effusive way Cary begged me to be there. I said I would but since she hadn’t heard any more from Lisa Waring it might be that she had changed her mind. It might even be that all along it was a hoax or a ploy to attract attention to herself. There was even a possibility she didn’t work for this company at all but had been shown the promotional material by someone who did. Had Cary checked up on that? It wouldn’t be difficult.

  Cary confessed that she hadn’t. I could see she was worried but she brightened at my suggestion that Lisa Waring—if there was such a person—might be doing this out of malice or amusement and said she would phone the company and ask to speak to her. I reminded Cary that to many the mere thought of being in even tenuous contact with television people seemed exciting.

  Meanwhile, my flat was finally sold and Willow Road became my home. Gordon and Aubrey were frequent visitors. They had been on their records-searching trip to Denmark and Gordon had filled in most of the gaps in his genealogical table. He had been able to take the Westerbys back to 1780 and the Kastrups a further fifty years. Gyldendal liked the idea of a family tree as frontispiece to their new edition and the British publishers were nearly as enthusiastic. At this time all that was left for Gordon to do was find who it was Asta’s great-grandfather and whom Tante Frederikke’s grandfather had married in the 1790s and if, as he suspected, Rasmus’s maternal grandmother had been illegitimate.

  Of course I’d questioned him about that visit to Devon Villa but he knew no more than he had originally told me. Swanny had been mysterious about it. She had been secretive, he’d thought so at the time.

  ‘You couldn’t say she led us to believe this was Asta’s home she was taking us to,’ Aubrey said. ‘Not exactly. She never said whose home it had been.’

  ‘But she did imply her own family—well, my own family—had lived there. She said, “my mother and father”.’ Gordon remembered the ghost story and he remembered Swanny’s dislike of it. The second floor had appalled him as it had me but he had no recollection of the pictures nor of Swanny’s offer to buy them. ‘I didn’t ask who they were, I wasn’t interested. I knew they weren’t Asta and Rasmus.’

  Then I told him, I told them both, of Swanny’s ignorance of who she was. At first Gordon was concerned only for his genealogical table. He wanted to know if he should put ‘adopted’ in brackets after Swanny’s name, but agreed not to when I explained what difficulties something like that would incur for future, and indeed past, editions of the diaries.

  He said in his earnest way, nodding a little, giving me that Westerby look, right into the eyes, ‘I shall find out who she was.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ I said.

  The next set of diaries, to be entitled Peace and War, were in print and I, along with a dozen other people, had the task of reading the proofs. It’s true what a lot of writers say, that you never really know what a work is like until you see it in print. A typed manuscript or even one that is a word processor print-out isn’t the same. Reading them for typographical errors and errors of fact and sense, I nevertheless aimed at reading them for pleasure too.

  I knew, from having seen Margrethe Cooper’s translation in manuscript, that there
was nothing here to give a clue to Swanny’s origins. But that was what I was on the lookout for. It hadn’t much concerned me while Swanny was alive but since her death, since Roper, since learning of the identity she’d assumed, my own need to know had grown and grown. It would never in the nature of things be as great as hers had been but it was strong enough for me. Cary longed to know who was Edith Roper and I to know who Swanny was. Practically the only thing we did know was that they were not each other.

  I had never read Arthur Roper’s memoir and I gave the copy back to Cary. She suggested I might like to look at the piece Cora Green had written for the Star in the autumn of 1905.

  I took a break from the diary proofs and read it. Of course, Cora Green hadn’t written it herself, it had been ‘ghosted’, though no doubt the facts, if facts they were, came from her. The ghost-writer had a flowery, precious and pompous style, and one that was old-fashioned even then. Lizzie Roper was dead and therefore couldn’t, in law, be libelled, so Mrs Green had gone to town on her lovers and her behaviour in their company. Maria Hyde was dead too and the fact that she and Cora Green had once been bosom friends conveniently forgotten.

  Our street had been a respectable place until that notorious family, whose doings have lately formed the subject matter of so much scandal, took up their abode at Devon Villa. As one of those inclined to believe the best of people until proved otherwise, as a trusting and perhaps overly innocent woman, I confess I soon formed a friendship with my new neighbour, Mrs Maria Hyde.

  Was that honourable title hers by right? Naturally, I did not inquire. She was known as ‘Mrs’ and so I called her. We were Mrs Hyde and Mrs Green until the intimacy of friendship dictated a change to Maria and Cora.

  In those early days, the final decade of the last century, Maria Hyde had three lodgers, Mr Dzerjinski, Miss Cottrell and Mr Ironsmith. The little maid, not much more than a child but required to do most of the work of the house, was called Florence and she hailed from that wretched part of Hackney that is an acknowledged disgrace, the marshes of the River Lea.