by Ruth Rendell
Cary didn’t want to know any more. She would have liked Lisa to fall under a bus in Piccadilly and her production to go out unchallenged. But she had to have a meeting with Ironsmith’s great-granddaughter, there was no escape. And I had to be there. I didn’t ask to speak to Cary myself, knowing of old that as soon as she had a man on the premises she would always get him to make her awkward or difficult phone calls for her. She had even managed to use Daniel in this way.
A few days had gone by since Gordon came to tell us Swanny was Hansine’s child. As soon as he had gone Paul said quite adamantly that he knew this solution was the wrong one. He felt it was wrong and he thought feelings, intuition, meant a lot in these matters. Without being able to prove it, he knew Hansine had never had a child before his mother’s birth, he knew his mother wasn’t Swanny Kjær’s half-sister. But he thought he could prove it by recourse to the diaries, by examining the original Danish in Asta’s first notebook.
I said nothing to anyone of Gordon’s revelation. Who was there who would care? Gordon’s own father perhaps, and his uncle Charles. If he wanted to, Gordon could tell them himself. More important were the diaries themselves. As things were, much of the interest in the diaries rested on a huge deception. Swanny, the beloved daughter of a woman whose name was almost a household word, was not that woman’s daughter but the illegitimate child of a servant who figured prominently in the diaries. You will see by this that I had very little faith in Paul’s intuition. I don’t trust it, in men or women, and in this case I thought it was a defence he put up against a curiously painful disclosure.
Sometime, I supposed, I would have to decide, I and Swanny’s editor would have to decide, whether the next set of diaries to be published should carry a note to the effect that Swanny wasn’t Asta’s daughter. It would be awkward. It would deprive the existing diaries, those previously published, of a good deal of verisimilitude and it would look like a calculated deception. While Swanny knew, or almost for certain knew, she wasn’t Asta’s child but could only fantasize about whose she might be, it seemed all right for concealment to go on. Things changed when the truth was established. Could we really go ahead and publish Peace and War, 1935–1944, while aware that the woman written about on nearly every page, the woman figuring in Gordon’s genealogical table as the elder daughter of Asta and Rasmus, had an entirely different origin?
Time was left to me before I need take any steps. There were a few weeks to go before it would be too late to insert a page of explanation into each of the twenty thousand copies the diaries’ publishers knew they could sell in hardcover. I had, in fact, much less than that to wait. Paul soon found his proof. It came in the early part of the first notebook. First he asked me to read the passage in the published version:
Hansine takes Mogens to the school which is two streets away in Gayhurst Road. He wants to go alone and soon I’ll let him, but not quite yet. She grumbles under her breath because when her visitor is in the house she gets fearful pains in her stomach. I stay at home with Knud and take him on my lap and tell him a story. It used to be H.C. Andersen for both the boys but when I left Denmark I left Andersen behind too. I suddenly realized how cruel some of his stories were.
‘There’s a bit I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘but there are bits like that all through the diaries.’
‘You mean the “visitor in the house”,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t suppose Gordon understood it either. You’re too young.’
I said I was older than he and he laughed and said maybe it wasn’t a matter of age, more of being interested in euphemism. Because he was, he had noticed that phrase when he first read the diaries and it must have remained in his mind. That was the real source of his intuition.
‘I went back to the Danish. The Danes don’t have anywhere like as many euphemisms as we do but they have some. Asta may have been frank about a lot of things but not about menstruation. That’s the last bastion of prudery; you could say it’s only gone down in the past twenty years. Margrethe Cooper translated what Asta originally wrote as “visitor in the house” because in spite of English having more euphemisms than Danish there was no idiomatic translation for Asta’s den røde blomst, which actually means “her red flower”.’
If Asta had written hun har det maanedlige (she has her monthly) or even hun har sit skidt (she has her dirt) it could have been literally translated and there would have been no difficulty. Even Gordon, presumably no expert in female physiology, would have known what that meant. Margrethe Cooper had had to find a matching English expression and had come up with one used by very old women still alive in the 1970s, ‘she has a visitor in the house’.
‘Swanny must have known,’ I said.
‘She knew from her first reading of the first notebook, so from the start she could dismiss Hansine as a possible mother. Hansine menstruating on July the 5th couldn’t have given birth to a child on July the 28th, or even a month later.
It would have been different, as Cary said later, if this had happened a year before. Then with what delight and excitement she would have welcomed Lisa Waring and her revelations from the past. Lisa would have been taken on as her adviser—that she hadn’t was a principal cause of present and ridiculous resentment—and Cary would have enjoyed the distinction of solving a murder nearly a century after it had been committed.
That resentment had another, and very peculiar, cause. Few of us would relish discovering that even a remote ancestor was a probable murderer. A father cast in such a role would be terrible, a grandfather disquieting and a great-grandfather quite bad enough. But that was Lisa Waring’s contention. George Ironsmith, otherwise undistinguished, was, she insisted, the killer of Lizzie Roper and she wanted his rights, she wanted recognition for him, fame or infamy, celebrity or notoriety, whatever you chose to call it.
I had that sensation of watching psychological disturbance actively at work that you have when someone presents the irrational as rational and the absurd as entirely serious. Lisa’s face was pale and heart-shaped, her nose rather long. Only the hair, black and straight and worn pageboy fashion, and her eyes, nipped at the corner by the epicanthic fold, were oriental. As she talked her eyes grew glazed and fixed themselves on a distant point. She had done her homework on the texts given her by Cary and quoted Mr Justice Edmonson verbatim.
‘ “You have been engaged in one of the most remarkable trials that are to be found in the annals of the Criminal Courts of England for many years.” That’s what the judge said. I’m quoting from the transcript of the trial in the Mockridge account. He goes on, “That the unfortunate woman had been done to death there is no doubt She was murdered in a most remarkable way. There is no doubt that the murder was committed by someone who knew well how to put a person quickly to death.” It sounds like he admired the perpetrator of that murder, doesn’t it? Well, doesn’t it?’
We were in Cary’s flat this time and Miles was with us. He said, ‘OK, so you’re looking for some posthumous glory for your great-grandad. It’s weird but it’s well-known some people want the limelight no matter how it comes.’
‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ she said.
I could see Miles was thinking that, in the light of her recent claims, what others would take for an insult would be flattery to her. He didn’t say it.
‘I was going to say,’ he said, ‘that that’s all very well but have you any evidence that George Ironsmith cut Lizzie Roper’s throat?’
She had. If you could believe her. Watching her strange eyes that were dull yet continually shifting, her otherwise concentrated stillness, I had difficulty in believing anything she said. Evidence should be provable and this was hardly that.
‘There’s a family tradition that he killed someone. He couldn’t go back to Britain for that reason. Everyone in our family knew it. His wife knew it and he told his daughter, who was my grandmother, he told her when she was sixteen. That was just before he died.’
She had made a rough genealogical table, just a dir
ect family line of descendants of George Ironsmith, nothing like the complicated structure of Gordon’s Westerby tree. It was passed round and I spent a minute or two looking at it. Ironsmith had married a woman called Mary Schaffer in 1904 and they had one daughter, also Mary, born that same year. Mary Ironsmith married Clarence Waring in 1922 and the youngest of their four children, Spencer Waring, born in 1933, married Betty Wong Feldman in 1959. These two were Lisa’s parents.
A ‘family tradition’ wasn’t of course proof that Ironsmith had killed anyone. Lisa had been in touch with her father since she first saw Cary’s video and he had sent her a bundle of papers that had come down to him from his own mother. As far as I could see, the only item of any relevance was a postcard Ironsmith had sent to his wife from England in 1905. There was no address on it beyond ‘London’ but it was dated and the date was July 28th. Another interesting thing about this postcard was the picture. Visitors to London mostly send home picture postcards of Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament but this one was of the boating lake in Victoria Park, a sepia photograph of the only scenic part of Hackney.
Ironsmith’s message to his wife was that he would be leaving for home on the following day, that is, Saturday, July 29th. That was all there was on the card apart from ‘Dearest Mary,’ a line about the weather being hotter than at home, ‘my best love, Georgie’, and, at the top, above the address, a curious mark like an asterisk, or a multiplication mark drawn on top of a plus sign. It proved Ironsmith had been in London and probably in Hackney around the time of Lizzie’s death but not that he had killed her.
‘What’s the significance of that mark?’ Cary asked.
‘It’s to tell my great-grandmother he’d killed Lizzie.’
This was so patently ridiculous we had nothing to say to it. Lisa gave us her explanation just the same. Mary Schaffer Ironsmith was jealous of the woman she saw as a rival and could only be satisfied when she knew she was dead and out of the way. Lisa’s father remembered his mother saying what a devoted couple her parents were. Ironsmith ‘adored’ his wife, he would have done anything for her.
Cary wanted to know what was in the rest of the papers but Lisa said there was nothing significant, they were just letters between her great-grandparents and irrelevant documents. Still, it would be wrong not to look, Cary said, and began going through them. Lisa got up, rubbed her back as if sitting in an armchair was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and dropped cross-legged on to the floor.
The ‘irrelevant documents’ included Mary Schaffer’s birth certificate but not, of course, George Ironsmith’s.
‘If I’d had that I’d have known where he came from,’ Lisa said in her rather surly way.
The Ironsmiths’ marriage certificate, issued at Chicago in February 1904, gave Mary Schaffer’s age as thirty-eight and her status as a widow. George Ironsmith was himself thirty-four, his profession described as ‘commercial traveller’. The letters that had passed between them, mostly during their engagement, were as dull and uninformative as those which poor Mogens had written home from France and my cousins had tried in vain to publish. Lisa had been right and they told us nothing beyond the fact that Mary Schaffer had been married to her first husband for fifteen years and the marriage had been childless.
The bombshell wasn’t in the letters at all but in a copy of George Ironsmith’s indentures. These showed that for seven years from 1885 he had been apprenticed to a butcher and slaughterman in Carlisle.
‘My dad found that,’ Lisa said from her Buddha-like pose on the floor. ‘I’d never seen it before.’
We all looked at the document, yellowed and faded with age. She watched us, pleased with the effect it had.
‘You know what the judge said. “She was murdered in a most remarkable way.” He said she was murdered by someone who knew well how to put a person quickly to death. He would, wouldn’t he? He’d been putting all those poor cows and sheep to death for years and years.’ Lisa squeezed her eyelids together. ‘Personally, I’m a vegetarian.’
‘But why would he do it?’ said poor Cary.
‘I told you, to please his wife. To get rid of Lizzie for ever.’
‘He’d put his own life in jeopardy for that? Murder a woman his wife had never seen and scarcely heard of? Murderers got hanged then, you know. They weren’t sent to do community service for a couple of years.’
‘For love,’ Lisa said coldly. ‘It was a great passion with my great-grandmother. People do these things for love. I know what ship he went back to the States on, if that helps you.’ She gave Cary an unpleasant smile when she spoke those last four words. ‘It was the Lusitania from Plymouth, England, to New York, and it called in somewhere, Boston, I think.’
Miles said perhaps passenger lists still existed.
‘You mean you don’t believe me,’ said Lisa. ‘You do really though, don’t you? You’d never have made that movie if you’d known what you know now. So what are you going to do about it?’
Not lose touch, Cary promised.
‘Oh, I’ll call you,’ said Lisa. ‘You don’t need to worry about that.’
After she had gone Cary went into hysterics. That’s easily said but Cary really did. She howled, she laughed, she banged her fists against the wall, she ran her fingers through her hair, stared wild-eyed at Miles and said she was going to start smoking again. This was it. She needed a very large drink and twenty cigarettes.
We went down to the pub.
‘What shall I do?’
‘A bit of checking before you commit yourself,’ I said. ‘That boat for a start.’
The two of us are inveterate researchers. We both knew where to find things and how to go about it. Not even for a couple of days, let alone years, would we have remained in ignorance of our great-grandparents’ provenance, we would have found out.
Of course, when doing research, in most cases one wants to find out. The truth may not fit a theory but then the theory must be sacrificed and one possibility after another eliminated. Cary, this time, didn’t just not want to know; she was emphatically, almost neurotically, against knowing. She would have liked to be able to forget it and simply get on with her next project. Not only did she not dare do this for fear of Lisa’s disclosures spoiling the effect of her production, but the way she had been trained made it not a feasible solution. She would get no pleasure out of the transmission of Roper, no possible satisfaction out of presenting to the public an erroneous account. She had to know but she was wretched as she went about it.
The first thing she discovered was that Lisa Waring—or, more probably, Spencer Waring—had been wrong about the ship in which George Ironsmith returned to the United States and his wife Mary on July 29th, 1905. Very likely the name Lusitania came into his mind because this was the British liner almost as famous in the history of sea tragedies as the Titanic. It was the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 which contributed to the entry of the United States into the First World War.
What had plied between Great Britain and the United States, across the Atlantic, in the early years of the century?
Cary got hold of a Cunard passengers’ log book. A formidable number of vessels went back and forth, the Hibernia, the Arabia, the Servia, the Umbria and Etruria among others. The Cephalonia, Pavonia, Catalonia, Bothnia and Scythia provided the weekly Boston service, from Liverpool on Thursdays and back from Boston on Saturdays, calling at Queenstown. It obviously wasn’t on one of these liners that Ironsmith had travelled.
Nor, if the postcard was to be relied on, had he used the fortnightly Tuesday service, plied by the Aurania, Servia and Gallia. None of these ships left from Plymouth but all from Liverpool, disembarking their passengers at the company’s centrally situated wharves, 51 and 52 (North River), New York City, and at the New Pier, foot of Clyde Street, East Boston.
Cary decided to forget Plymouth. This was obviously a mistake on Spencer Waring’s part. In her view the New York Saturday Mail Service from Liverpool was the most
likely option and that Ironsmith had travelled on the Campania, the Lucania, the Etruria or the Umbria. Second class, she hazarded, on a return ticket which would have cost him between $75 and $110. She applied to the Cunard Steamship Company and found to her astonishment that passenger lists existed. These, however, were kept in the country of destination, in this case in the National Archives in Washington, DC. It took her a little while but she found what she wanted—or what she needed—to know.
George Ironsmith had travelled to Liverpool from New York on Saturday, July 15th, 1905, and returned from Liverpool to New York on July 29th.
He had made the journey from the United States alone but he had not gone back unaccompanied.
28
IT WAS ALL so long ago.
The Lucania’s passenger list showed only that among the second-class passengers on Saturday, July 29th, 1905, had been George Ironsmith and Mary Ironsmith, the latter travelling at half-fare and so therefore a child between the ages of two and twelve.
If Ironsmith had a child there was no evidence for it. He had been a bachelor when he married in February 1904. The Waring family had never heard a whisper or rumour of some child born to him and his wife before they were married. Letters which had passed between him and Mary Schaffer made it clear she had no children of her first marriage.
Questioned by Cary, Lisa said she had no idea who this child was, had never before heard mention of a child in this connection. Plainly this digression made her impatient. All she wanted was for Cary to recognize her great-grandfather as the murderer of Lizzie. Probably this child was just someone Ironsmith had been asked to take to America in his charge, had Cary thought of that?
That would hardly explain that child being called Mary Ironsmith, Cary said. Besides, what parents or guardians would place their little girl in the care of an unknown young man on a six-day sea voyage?
It was Cary herself who at last expressed what we had both been thinking and had both half-dismissed as impossible. She had been re-reading the first volume of the diaries in the hope of finding a positive Roper clue. What she did find wasn’t a statement of contemporary fact at all but only one of Asta’s famous stories.