Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Although I’d promised myself to do so I had never searched the house that was now mine for those missing papers from the first diary. It was after Cary pointed out that the Roper connection was mostly in my imagination that I began my search. The only way to do it was systematically, starting at the top and working downwards, neglecting nothing, lifting carpets, looking for false backs to cupboards.

  I was about halfway through when something struck me. If the pages Swanny had torn out of the diary told her who she was, why had she persuaded herself she was Edith? She cannot in reality have been Edith, the missing pages can’t have told her she was, so what did they tell her? Something much worse, something entirely horrible, so that Edith was by far the better option?

  It suddenly looked to me as if Swanny had made herself into Edith because the alternative, the true identity she had discovered, was too appalling to live with. Yet it was quite a long time after she had torn out the pages that she took on an imaginary Edith personality. To imagine what she might have found defeated me but I went on looking.

  The fourth volume of the diaries was soon to be published. We hadn’t been able to decide whether this one should have Swanny’s photograph on the back jacket flap. All the previous volumes had carried it but Swanny had been alive then. She hadn’t been the author of the diaries, only their editor, and now she was dead and dead before she had had time to edit the notebooks spanning 1935–1944, wouldn’t it be better to do without her picture?

  There was no question of a picture of me replacing it. No reader would care much about Asta’s granddaughter who was only four at the end of this volume. But the idea of having nothing there but snippets from favourable reviews of past editions was vaguely unsatisfying. Asta’s own face dominated the front cover illustration, or, rather, four of her faces at various stages of her life, staring levelly from oval cut-outs.

  Swanny’s publishers—I still thought of them like that—kept sending me suggested versions. We could keep to the old format, we could have the photograph reduced in size and on the back flap instead of the back jacket, or we could use a different photograph of Swanny, perhaps one taken when she was a child or a young girl.

  Plenty of these were available. I had only to look through Asta’s albums. She had had Swanny photographed more than her other children, perhaps only because she was better looking than the rest. There was a studio portrait done for each birthday and many snapshots taken between times. I thought I’d seen every one of Asta’s albums but soon found I hadn’t or else I’d forgotten. They filled drawers in the room that had been hers. As I lifted them out the idea came to me that Swanny might have hidden the missing pages among them but of course she hadn’t.

  It was in the study that Swanny had first examined the notebooks. Still not quite convinced that she would have destroyed those missing pages, I looked through every book on the shelves for papers inserted among its pages. I found plenty, one always does: a thank-you letter of no interest, recipes, postcards from friends at seaside resorts, newspaper cuttings, nearly all of this in Danish, but not of course the missing pages. They had hurt too much to be kept, I thought, they were smoke dissolved, the sound of Swanny tearing them to bits lost somewhere in the spheres.

  If you want to destroy something you destroy it at once. You don’t keep it for posterity. It’s a bit like those thrillers on film where the villain has the hero at his mercy but instead of shooting him as anyone would settles down to boast of his triumphs and taunt his victim. By the time he’s finished rescue has arrived. Swanny wouldn’t have waited for rescue to arrive but have burnt the sheets at once.

  There was a half-column in the newspaper about a VC coming up for sale at Sotheby’s. The vendor was a Richard Clark, grandson of the man who had won it. His name meant nothing to me but his grandfather’s did.

  Of course, much less space would have been devoted to this story if the original VC hadn’t achieved a kind of fame elsewhere. It wasn’t for his conspicuous gallantry on the Somme on July 1st, 1916, that readers wanted to know about the late Sergeant Harry Duke, but because of the important place he had in Asta’s diaries. This was the brave soldier who had done his best to save Asta’s son’s life and later been Asta’s platonic lover.

  I was reading the piece aloud to Paul, including a not very accurate synopsis of the relevant diary passages, when Gordon arrived. He came up the front steps and, seeing us, tapped on the window.

  He was dressed like an undertaker. His suit was dark and formal, his tie not black but grey with a black design. If there had been anyone I dearly loved elsewhere I would have feared he had come to tell me of a death or dreadful accident.

  It must all have shown in my face for he said in his earnest way, ‘Don’t look so alarmed. You’re not really going to mind this. You may even quite like it.’

  Paul must have thought he was referring to this unexpected visit, for he simply said we were delighted to see him and went on to talk about the sale of the Harry Duke VC. Gordon listened politely but at the first opportunity said to him, ‘I want to see a photograph of your mother.’

  ‘Of my mother?’

  ‘Ann says you’ve got photographs. Just to confirm something.’

  She was in her garden in a flowered silk dress. It was a windy day and her hair was blown about, one hand holding down her skirt to stop it flapping up over her knees. You couldn’t see much of what she looked like, only that she was tall and thin and fair-haired. Paul had it among the small stack of photographs and papers he had brought away from her house after she was dead. Gordon had his own copy of Asta with him and he opened it to show Swanny’s picture on the back jacket flap. Blue tweed suit, blue felt hat, a tall thin fair woman standing beside the Little Mermaid.

  ‘What do you see?’

  He had paused before speaking, spoke in measured dramatic tones. I’ve sometimes thought Gordon has considerable acting ability.

  ‘They both look like Danes,’ I said.

  ‘Is that all?’

  I asked him what he wanted me to see.

  ‘Don’t they look like—sisters, half-sisters?’

  ‘If we take it for granted that sisters, especially half-sisters, often don’t look very much alike.’

  I turned to Paul and saw his uneasiness. He said, making an effort to keep his voice light, ‘What are you saying, Gordon?’

  ‘I don’t want to give you a shock. But you probably won’t be, you’ll be pleased. It’ll sort of make you and Ann cousins.’

  ‘Are you telling us,’ I said, ‘that Hansine was Swanny’s mother?’

  ‘It explains a lot of things,’ Gordon said. ‘Asta says in the diaries how fat Hansine is and we’ve taken this as spitefulness or a typical attitude of the thin woman to one a little heavier. She’s not fat in the famous photograph of the family having tea on the lawn and Hansine waiting on them. Asta never refers to her being fat in later years. She was fat in 1905 because she was pregnant.

  ‘Asta may not have known she was pregnant for quite a long while. Clothes were a good disguise for a pregnancy in those days. Authorities on the history of fashion say that the shape of women’s clothes for hundreds of years was designed that way because women were always pregnant. The sort of clothes that became fashionable in the twenties, narrow and clinging, and remained more or less like that, did so partly because women were pregnant much less often. Hansine might not have had to admit her pregnancy until she was seven or eight months and then it would have been too late to get rid of her. Besides, we get the impression Asta wouldn’t have been all that intolerant about something like that. Rasmus might have been but Rasmus wasn’t there.’

  ‘So Asta and Hansine were pregnant at exactly the same time? Isn’t that too much like coincidence?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Hansine’s baby could have been born a month or even six weeks after Asta lost hers. We don’t know that Swanny’s birthday was July 28th, only that Asta says it was because that was the day she gave birth to a dead child.’

/>   ‘Who was the father?’

  ‘The obvious candidate is Rasmus himself but it’s just as obviously wrong. He comes out of the diaries as strict and strait-laced, not a philanderer, not much interested in Asta but not interested in other women either. Not at all the sort of man to tumble the maid while his wife was out. Much more likely to be out tinkering with a car engine.’

  ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘he didn’t like Swanny, he liked her least of all his children. If he didn’t know it, he sensed she wasn’t his.’

  ‘We know Hansine had an earlier lover. Asta says so when Hansine asks permission to have Paul’s grandfather to tea. She says some uncomplimentary things about Hansine’s appearance and then reflects that Sam Cropper isn’t the first man to come courting her.’

  ‘I wonder who it was.’

  ‘Some Dane,’ Gordon said. ‘Someone in Copenhagen, a working man or another servant. She had to leave him when your grandparents emigrated to England.’

  ‘She didn’t have to go with them.’

  ‘Perhaps she did. Perhaps he wouldn’t or couldn’t marry her. He may have been married already or unable to support her.’ I said that Hansine had always loved Swanny best of the Westerby children. The truth began to come clear. Asta lost her own child but no doctor had been present at the birth. She says frequently how much she dislikes being attended by a doctor, a man being witness to these intimate and, in her eyes, degrading things. Somewhere she says she wishes there could be women doctors. She never registered the death because she looked to Hansine’s coming child as a replacement for hers. Perhaps she stipulated that she would only take it if it was a girl. That would be like Asta.

  ‘They must have been on tenterhooks lest Rasmus came back early,’ Gordon said.

  There was no way of knowing when the child was born. What would have become of it if it had been a boy? I couldn’t imagine Asta actually harming a baby but I could easily picture her going out at night with a bundle in her arms and dumping it on the doorstep of, say, the German Hospital.

  But Hansine’s child had been a girl and she had gladly given it up to Asta. What else could she do? Apart from being able to claim Swanny as hers and be called her mother, she had for years most of the pleasures and pains of motherhood. She saw the child every day, looked after her, put her to bed and bathed her, sat her on her lap, enjoyed her affection. Indeed, it could be said that it was she who had deserted Swanny, not the other way about, when in 1920 a few months before Swanny’s fifteenth birthday she left the household to marry Paul’s grandfather.

  ‘Some time or other she must have told your mother,’ I said to Paul.

  He said nothing. He had hardly spoken since Gordon began his explanation. I thought of his mother, the unhappy author of anonymous letters. Probably Hansine had not told her until she was grown-up. It would have had a bad effect, it may have been responsible for the way Joan Sellway reacted to so many things. For instance, that hatred of her mother’s references to being in service. She would have seen her position as a servant as responsible for her having to give up her child. A servant is totally in the power of employers and has no rights or choice. That’s how it would have appeared to her. The irony of it made things worse, that the illegitimate unwanted child had a more privileged life than the legitimate presumably wanted one.

  She had never met Swanny but she saw that picture in the Tatler. Her resentment and bitterness came to a head and she composed the anonymous letter. I remembered how Swanny had later gone to her and asked her if she could throw any light on her origins but Joan Sellway had pretended not to understand.

  I could say none of this in Gordon’s presence. I felt a sudden terrible embarrassment for Paul, an awkwardness that might never be erased. Then I saw him smile.

  ‘We can’t be cousins, Gordon,’ he said. ‘If Swanny was my grandmother’s daughter she was certainly my aunt but she was only Ann’s if she was Ann’s mother’s sister. All that’s happened is we’ve swapped aunts.’

  Sensitive enough to have realized Paul’s temporary dismay, Gordon was delighted to see him laughing and making jokes about the relationship. He was naturally proud of himself for his successful detective work and insisted on going through the earliest part of the diary with us. Here, in June, Asta notes that Hansine was ‘so fat and getting fatter’, later on in July, she refers to Hansine holding ‘her hands over her stomach which is nearly as big as mine’, and then, again of Hansine, to ‘the man she was going about with in Copenhagen’.

  To refer back to the time of her birth, wasn’t this the easiest and indeed the only way a baby might have been found to replace Asta’s dead child? Asta, having just given birth, wouldn’t have been able to go out and secure for herself someone’s unwanted child. Hansine was there, Hansine was under the same roof. Just as Hansine had played the midwife to Asta on July 28th, 1905, so Asta had assisted at Hansine’s delivery a few days or a week or two weeks later.

  So we accepted it. Details were most likely in the missing diary pages and those we were never going to find. There would be no records left by Hansine because Hansine couldn’t write. But this was the answer Swanny had sought for twenty-five years. If Asta never told her, this was because Asta had always despised Hansine and baulked at admitting her favourite child was the daughter of a servant and of some tradesman or artisan in Copenhagen.

  No doubt it happened all the time. Grandparents brought up their daughters’ illegitimate children as their own and childless householders took on their servants’ secretly delivered babies. It was a kind of underground or unofficial adoption society. Why did Hansine keep silence? Because, doubtless, it was infinitely to her advantage to see her baby who would otherwise have gone to an orphanage, brought up in comfort and love as part of a secure middle-class family. It wasn’t as if she was separated from her child but saw her every day, as a mother in a fairy story, deprived of the title of mother, condemned to servitude and the name of a servant, to a life of menial tasks, watched her daughter grow up as a princess, remote yet close at hand.

  Such women figure in mythology because once this was the reality. Children were less precious and less valued than today. The laws governing their lives were more lax. Paul and I accepted Gordon’s explanation, as I’ve said, or I accepted it.

  The only flaw in it was that it wasn’t true.

  27

  I HAD FORGOTTEN Lisa Waring and I believe Cary had too. If she ever came into Cary’s mind she must have thought Lisa had returned to the United States long ago. A mild uneasiness was all she felt when a parcel came, a padded bag containing all the material she had given Lisa, including the three cassettes, and with the sender’s name and address on the back in the American fashion. The address, however, wasn’t America but Battersea. Lisa Waring had moved but not more than a mile or two.

  Television productions are seldom transmitted on the expected dates. There are nearly always delays and postponements. Roper was to have gone out in February but was put off till April and finally scheduled for May, just over two years after Cary began her project, exactly two years after I discovered the stubs in Asta’s notebooks where the pages had been torn out.

  The press screening in early April was at BAFTA, where Paul and I had been to the private showing. It was over by nine and at half-past Miles Sinclair was on the phone to tell me that Lisa Waring had turned up at it, had walked in at the last moment before the lights dimmed and stood surveying the audience before proceeding slowly—and, he said, menacingly—all the way down the aisle to take the only vacant seat in the front row. Miles has nearly as exaggerated a way of talking as Cary and when he described Lisa’s appearance as being like the wicked witch turning up uninvited to the christening or Ate throwing the golden apple into the midst of the guests, I didn’t take him very seriously.

  Afterwards, when they were all in the bar and he was in the middle of an interview with some journalist, Lisa came up to Cary and said to her quite baldly that she could tell the press a few things that woul
d make her production look pretty silly. Cary was astounded because Lisa had been perfectly pleasant on that day we had all met and the covering note that came with the returned papers was friendly, saying mostly that she was still in London because she had found freelance work here. Now Lisa was antagonistic. She resented the portrait of her great-grandfather, felt even more angry now she had seen the production on the big screen.

  During the past week she had been searching for George Ironsmith’s origins. He had been born in Whitehaven in 1871, apprenticed to a tradesman in Carlisle at the age of fourteen, emigrated to America in 1897 and married her great-grandmother in the autumn of 1904. The substance of her complaint was that Cary should have called her in as an adviser before she went ahead with more screenings of Roper and hadn’t done so.

  According to Miles, Cary did have the presence of mind to ask her what on earth any of this had to do with the validity of her production. Ironsmith, Lisa said, shouldn’t have been consigned to an insignificant role, he was the most important figure in the drama. She and Cary should talk about it, she was prepared to do this before she spoke to the press. This last remark was uttered in ringing tones but no one took much notice because all the journalists were concerned with was the fate of Edith Roper.

  Children are always of interest, girl children for some reason more so, and missing girl children consumingly so. This may have happened eighty-six years before but the press were still fascinated by Edith’s disappearance, the claimants to her identity and all the possibilities of what might have happened to her. They didn’t much care, Miles said, about who might or might not have killed Lizzie, that was water under the bridge, ancient history. So a wild girl with Chinese eyes dressed all in black, shouting about her great-grandfather’s rights, was only a momentary diversion.