Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  I didn’t expect it. After all, I’m nearly seventy-seven and he must be seventy-five, I’m not absolutely sure but something like that. He’d asked me to have lunch with him and he drove me down to London, to a very nice French place in Charlotte Street. We’ve always enjoyed sharing meals, we both like the same food and a lot of it.

  We were having our coffee and a brandy each. Harry’s taken to smoking cigars and I like to see a man with a cigar, though not smoking them myself the way so many Danish women do. He lit his cigar and he said without anything to lead up to it and not a bit nervous, ‘Asta, will you marry me?’

  I didn’t know what to say, which is unusual with me. I didn’t blush either. Perhaps you get too old to be able to blush. I think I went pale instead, I know I shivered.

  He said, ‘I love you and I know you love me.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, that goes without saying.’

  ‘Nothing goes without saying, Asta.’ He said it very gently and sweetly.

  ‘I love you then,’ I said.

  And there was a long silence in which we looked at each other and looked away and looked at each other again. In that time I was thinking furiously, I was thinking like I’ve never thought before. Or so I suppose. In a long life like mine you forget what you’ve felt in the past and what you’ve thought before, there’s no use pretending. But I thought how I’d longed for him when we were young and how handsome he was and longing for me, and now I’m a dried-up old woman, really dried up, though no one ever writes things like that down. Except me. I write them. I don’t think I could do those things in bed with a man now, it wouldn’t be possible physically. I am dried and closed like a husk. And my naked body looks as if it needs ironing, nothing else will get the creases out. I’d be ashamed to let a man see me and touch me now.

  No doubt, he didn’t mean a marriage with that in it. What’s the point then? That was the only thing in marriage I wanted and never had. The rest is the part I don’t like, the familiarity, the getting to know someone’s worst side, the increasing contempt. That would never happen with us, I could hear him saying if I told him. So I didn’t. I just said no.

  ‘No, Harry, I won’t marry you,’ I said.

  ‘Funny, I was afraid you wouldn’t. I almost knew you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I would have once,’ I said, ‘when we couldn’t.’

  ‘I wonder what good it’s done us,’ he said, ‘being so good and moral. Sticking with the people we were married to, I mean. Honourable behaviour, they’d have called it when we were young.’

  ‘You couldn’t have left Mrs Duke,’ I said. It’s funny but I couldn’t remember her name. I’d always just called her Mrs Duke. ‘I always knew that. And I wouldn’t have left my husband. I’m too stubborn, I suppose. You make a bargain and you stick with it but it’s all bosh really, isn’t it?’

  He said he didn’t know. He didn’t know the answers, only that it was too late, it would have been too late even if he’d met me when I lived in Lavender Grove and he was single with a job in Islington. ‘But we’ll never leave each other, will we? We’ll be friends till one of us dies?’

  I nodded. For a moment I couldn’t speak, so I just kept nodding my head, on and on, like a toy or a doll. He took my hand and kissed it, the way he does sometimes.

  June 16th, 1963

  I have bought two dozen cards to send out for the chocolate party we shall have for my eighty-third birthday next month. Swanny and Marie will be there, of course, and I shall ask Ann, though no one knows where young people get to these days. Does anyone know where she actually lives? Not with her mother, I’m sure.

  Knud and Maureen will have to be invited but I doubt if they’ll come all this way. Knud is supposed to have something wrong with his prostate gland, whatever it is men have. I’m not asking John and his wife, I hardly know them, I don’t suppose I’ve seen John since Rasmus’s funeral. Mrs Evans, of course, and Mrs Cline and Margaret Hammond who’s married now but whose surname I can’t remember. I don’t think women keep up these long-term quarrels like men do. If Mr Housman hadn’t died I’m sure Rasmus would have gone on hating him till he died but the flu carried him off by a piece of luck for everyone, to be frank, so that Mrs Housman that I always liked could be free to marry Mr Hammond. I can’t help feeling I’ve written all this before. You do get to repeat yourself at my age. I must remember to ask Swanny for Margaret’s married name and where she lives.

  Someone I’d really like to invite is that Mrs Jørgensen I had such an interesting talk with at Swanny’s luncheon party. But I’m told she’s gone back to Denmark. I wonder if she’ll keep her promise and send me a copy of the book she’s writing when it comes out, the one with the chapter in it about the Georg Stage?

  Harry hasn’t gone anywhere, I’m glad to say. A chocolate party would be no celebration without him there. I’d better ask his eldest girl as well and she can drive him. He’s been nervous about driving since he started getting those tremors in his hands.

  I’ve left writing about this to the end. In fact, I nearly didn’t write about it at all. Swanny showed me an anonymous letter she had had. Poor thing, she was in an awful state, hardly able to speak, shaking all over, I can’t imagine why. It was just as I was getting ready to go out and buy the cards and I was thinking about that and the people I’d invite and I wasn’t really paying attention. But when she waved the wretched thing at me and I could see she was working herself up, I took it from her, tore it up and burnt it. The best thing to do. I went out immediately afterwards, to be on my own really. Shock doesn’t affect you straightaway, it takes a few minutes. I was shaking a bit as I walked down Willow Road and then I said to myself, who cares? Who cares now?

  October 5th, 1964

  Ann didn’t phone but came to us this afternoon to tell us Marie had died. We expected it, we were waiting for it, but the shock is still there.

  It is a terrible thing to lose one’s children, perhaps the worst thing in the world. But long ago I decided it was for the best not to show my feelings, to keep calm, to carry on. Soldier on, as Torben says. Grief is best kept in the heart—or written down. Nowadays I pretend I have no feelings left and I find people believe it, I think they like to believe it, it removes their responsibility for me. I pretend that my heart has been made hard by the many blows it has taken over all these years.

  This diary sometimes looks like a chronicle of death, as one after another die, but I didn’t expect to lose my youngest, only fifty-three and still young to me.

  April 21st, 1966

  The papers are full of a murder trial, a man called Ian Brady and a woman called Myra Hindley charged with killing children up in Lancashire. It’s fascinating but horrible. From her photographs the woman looks much older than she is, only twenty-something, and the man looks just a thug. To me she looks just like a German, I’m sure she must have German ancestry.

  Not many people have known a murderer. It would be strange to find out afterwards that a person you knew had murdered someone. This case has made me remember that business in Navarino Road when we first came to London. My memory is falling to bits because I can’t remember the name of the house or the name of the people, only that I saw the woman once and wished her house was mine.

  June 4th, 1966

  I hate this forgetfulness. Whole decades of my life have slipped away from me and only a dim impression of a whole ten years remains, like a picture painted on glass that’s nearly faded away. I remember my childhood and going up to the cottage in Strandvej for the summer, that holiday on Bornholm when I was seven, my mother always ill in bed and having to creep about so as not to disturb her. Tante Frederikke used to make me walk with a book on my head for my posture and give me buttermilk soup, which I hated so much and had to sit at the table until I’d finished it. I can remember whole days from that time in the greatest detail. It is the middle years which are gone.

  I wish Swanny wouldn’t keep asking me. She refuses to believe me when I say I can�
��t remember. Some, of course, I remember, the fact of it, but not who and when and how. I resolved once never to write of it but I could laugh when I think how little that resolution matters now. I couldn’t write of it if I chose because I’ve forgotten nearly everything.

  October 2nd, 1966

  I get very tired in the evenings now, quite early in the evening, which never used to be the case, and I think the bits I write are getting shorter and shorter. What I’ve started doing instead is writing to Harry. We do see each other a couple of times a week but that’s not so easy now he is housebound and never drives and I’m dependent on Swanny for taxis.

  Taxis are extremely expensive. I pay for mine out of the sales of all those old clothes. I’ve been back to the woman in St John’s Wood High Street and sold the blue-and-black Chanel two-piece and the pleated Patou dress. Did I buy them in Paris or in London? I can’t remember. She got quite excited, said she never expected to see anything so beautiful and in such good condition.

  I’m going to stop now and write to Harry. I still write English very badly but he doesn’t mind. He calls them his love letters and he says I’m the only woman who has ever written him any.

  ‘What about that girl you were in love with when you were twenty-five?’

  ‘Twenty-four,’ he said. ‘I was twenty-four. It’s true I was in love and I meant to marry her but when it came to it she wouldn’t have me, she said something had happened to put her off men and marriage. But she said all that, she didn’t put it in a letter.’

  ‘Your wife must have written to you when you were in France in the first war,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, she did, and regularly,’ he said, ‘good letters full of home and the girls and how they all missed me, but they weren’t love letters. They weren’t like yours, Asta. Yours are great love letters like—well, like Robert Browning’s.’

  ‘Don’t you mean like Mrs Browning’s?’ I said. I said it to cover up how pleased I felt. No one else has ever told me I write well. I suppose no one else has had the chance.

  We read those Browning letters together—well, not together. I got them from the library and then I passed them on to him.

  September 2nd, 1967

  It is all over. I feel that life is, but it won’t stop, it has to go on. I will never cease to be grateful to that kind good girl that she sent for me to be with her father when he was dying. Not when he died, not that, for he died after we had all gone, in the night, in his sleep, but while he lay there waiting for the end. He had pneumonia and the drugs they gave him couldn’t fight it any longer, it was too strong for them. One of the girls said he always had such bad bronchitis, winter after winter, because he’d been gassed in the Great War but I never heard that before. I didn’t say, though, I let her think it. All I could think of was how he coughed over those cigars.

  He was eighty-five and that’s a good age. Long enough for anyone, you’d think, but not long enough for me. I’d have kept him alive until after I was dead myself, I’m selfish. He didn’t say any wonderful things to me as he lay there in the hospital, not about loving me for ever or any of that. He just held my hand and looked into my eyes but he was too weak to kiss my hand.

  Well, he’s gone. Swanny had driven me to the hospital and she brought me home just as Torben was coming in. I didn’t say anything, I had dinner with them as usual and went to bed at the usual time. We got a phone call this morning to say he didn’t last the night. Swanny was good to me but I wouldn’t let her hug me, I was embarrassed, after all Harry wasn’t my husband, he was just my best friend. I went up to my room and stayed there all day and all night and thought about him and wrote this down. Not a very brilliant diary entry. Not some of my best prose! But at least I didn’t cry. I don’t.

  September 9th, 1967

  I am dead tired. I’ve been to Harry’s funeral. Swanny wanted to take me but I wouldn’t let her, I had to go there alone. She looked at my flowers as if it were a bunch of rhubarb I was carrying but if my memory’s as bad as can be at least I remember how Harry loved canna lilies. When we went for walks in parks he’d always stop by the flowerbeds with the cannas and say that was what he really called a flower.

  There’s nothing else to say. I’ll never stop thinking about him but I’ve no wish to write it down. I’m too tired. This is the last entry I shall ever make in this diary. It’s pointless trying to keep any sort of record when you can’t remember what’s happened five minutes ago. I may burn all these notebooks, we’ll see. I burnt the ones I made when I was very young, I can remember that as if it were yesterday.

  No, not as if it were yesterday, for that’s just what I always forget.

  25

  JOAN SELLWAY IS TOO close to me, or would have been had she lived, for me to judge her. But Paul, who never said a word against her while she was alive, is no advocate of that adage about de mortuis and quite right too, I think. It’s wiser and kinder to say the good things about people while they’re alive and leave the condemnation for later. Not that there was much of that. But there was an explanation.

  I’d said nothing to him of my thought processes on the afternoon of his mother’s death. It was he who spoke of it first.

  ‘Do you remember telling me about an anonymous letter your Aunt Swanny had? The letter that started all the trouble?’

  As if I could forget. It had started trouble not only for Swanny. I could date the beginning of our own difficulties from my mention of that letter. I could see his face now as it had closed and his eyes grown dull, I could see him as he had withdrawn into himself and slowly become uncharacteristically cold.

  ‘My mother sent it.’

  I looked at him. I looked at him in simple wonder.

  ‘I don’t know it absolutely, that is, I couldn’t prove it. But of course I do know it. As soon as you told me I knew and it was like a blow. I was horrified. I could hardly speak.’ He said miserably but with an attempt at shrugging it off, ‘You must have noticed. I know you noticed but I couldn’t do anything about that. I was too full of disgust and I was too frightened.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘That she had sent it? I won’t say “written” it because she didn’t write them, she printed them in block capitals.’

  ‘She’d done others?’

  ‘Lots. No, that’s an exaggeration. Four or five before the one to your aunt. There was one to a woman whose husband was having an affair and another to someone who didn’t know her son was homosexual. One day she was in a rage about something and she told my father. It was her duty to enlighten people, she said. I expect something like that is always used as justification. My father left her when they were both middle-aged, they’d been married for twenty-five years. He gave me a long explanation of why and those letters came into it.’

  ‘She never told you herself?’

  ‘No, but I think you could say I never gave her the chance. Conversations with my mother were conducted on a very superficial level. I didn’t want to go below the surface. I suppose I was afraid to do that.’

  I thought about it, we were both silent, eyeing one another. Then I asked him why he was filled with fear: why had he been afraid when I first mentioned the letter?

  ‘Of losing you.’

  He said it with transparent simplicity.

  ‘Over that?’ I said.

  ‘People expect sons and daughters to be like their parents, they expect them to have the same faults. They blame people for their parents, though they shouldn’t. I’m not proud of being the son of an anonymous-letter writer. Can you honestly tell me that if I’d told you then it would have made no difference?’

  The odd thing was that I couldn’t. I couldn’t have told him that. It would have made some difference, a small difference, though perhaps not so small. But did it make a difference now?

  ‘What a good psychologist you are,’ I said and I got up and went to him and put my arms round him. I kissed him and felt that all was well, all was well enough.

  That letter
had damaged the last twenty years of Swanny’s life. It had occupied her life with its repercussions and isolated her from all the good, enjoyable things that might have been hers. From its arrival could be dated the beginning of that fruitless quest and the ultimate madness and destruction of everything she had once been. It could be argued, of course, and this I put to Paul to make him feel better, that without the letter the diaries would very likely never have come to light, never been published to become bestsellers and make a fortune. Swanny would very likely not have bothered to read them, still less have had them professionally translated and set in train the publication process.

  But I remembered her deathbed, at which I had been present. She had died at home, in the very early hours of one dark winter morning.

  We were to move her to hospital that very day, the doctor had recommended, then urged, it. Since the big stroke that took away the use of her left side and drew down the corner of her mouth, she had withdrawn into herself, into a dull silence and immobility. The attentions of the physiotherapist and all the jollying-along that is part of post-thrombosis therapy she had rejected by her simple apathy. She refused to re-learn to walk or make attempts at recapturing the use of her arm. She lay in her bed by night and sat in a wheelchair during the hours of daylight. I came to see her most days and sometimes I stayed in the house over a weekend.

  It was during one of these periods that the doctor’s recommendation to move her was made. One of the nurses had left and there was difficulty in finding a replacement. Swanny needed a day nurse and a night nurse and substitute day and night nurses when these women took their time off. A private room in a nursing home would make things easier for everyone, including, the doctor said, Swanny herself, who refused to be brought downstairs and was necessarily left alone for long dreary hours at a time.

  The duration of the dual personality was over, the reign of Edith Roper was over. I didn’t know it then but I’m pretty sure now that Swanny had her first stroke on the day, or a little while after the day, she went to Hackney with Gordon and Aubrey, was shown the Roper rooms and told the story of the haunted stairs. It was too much for her, it was too much for her blood and her brain.