Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Of course I don’t suppose the letter will ever reach him. He will have moved on somewhere else in search of money or a loan or something to do with motor cars. Anyway, I didn’t call him ‘my dearest husband’ or anything like that. I believe in honesty. I wrote ‘Dear Rasmus’ and ended it ‘your Asta’ more to be polite than anything else.

  July 26th, 1905

  Today I went out for a long walk. I took it slowly, carrying my great burden before me, and walked for many miles, returning by way of Ritson Road and Dalston Lane. I wanted to have a look at the Lutheran church, though it is German, not Scandinavian, and then I made a little detour to see the house where Hansine’s friend lives.

  If only Rasmus had taken such a house for us! It’s not grand, it couldn’t be in this part of London, but it’s big, on four floors, and you can see it’s seen better days. There are steps up to the front door which has two big pillars holding up a portico, nice railings along the front of a real front garden and lots of trees around. Navarino Road isn’t wide like Lavender Grove but narrow and shady and that always gives a better look to a street.

  I was standing there looking at it, thinking the rent couldn’t be more than £10 more than the £36 a year Rasmus pays for Lavender Grove, when a woman came out with a little girl. She was dressed very showily with a big feathery hat, but I had eyes only for the baby. That was all she was, though she could walk. She was so pretty and fair and dainty, like a fairy. I swear my baby moved when I was thinking this, put out a hand perhaps to greet this other child from inside there.

  Fanciful nonsense, I know that. But it cheered me up and saw me safely home, like the great awkward ship that I am, rocking and swaying into harbour. Mogens and Knud were outside on the pavement playing with the hoops I bought them out of the money my dear generous husband sent us. If I don’t need to pay a doctor when my daughter comes I shall spend some more and buy little Knud a spinning top. The boy next door has one so why shouldn’t my boy?

  As I entered the house a strong pain took hold of me and doubled me up. For a little while I thought, this is it. I didn’t want Hansine fussing, starting to get water boiling and hanging sheets over my bedroom door, so I went upstairs to take my hat off and stayed there in my bedroom, not sitting but standing and holding on to the bedpost. Another pain came but fainter than the first. I stood there, watching the boys and thinking how Knud too would be starting school in September and not knowing whether I was glad or sorry.

  Then it came to me that I’d have my daughter by that time. She would be more than a month old and I should be glad to have the boys out of the way. Perhaps she’d be born tonight, I thought. But though I stood there and finally sat down on the bed with my hands pressed to the great heavy lump, there were no more pains and I realized the same thing had happened as when I was expecting Mads. These are false pains some women have hours or even days before a real labour begins. Probably there is a scientific name for them but I don’t know what it is. Last year, in February, I had them on the Wednesday and Mads was born on the Friday. Poor little boy, I didn’t want him and I didn’t know how much I loved him till after he was dead.

  Suppose this one, my daughter, suppose she … But no, I won’t write it. I won’t even think it. Or will writing it down be a kind of insurance and make sure it can’t happen? I don’t believe in things like that. I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in God. I won’t give him a capital letter, I’ll cross that out, it’s ridiculous honouring something you don’t believe in. He’s just god, a god I know doesn’t exist. I think I first knew that when I had a baby coming out of the wrong place that I thought was going to split me into two bits. I shan’t be going to the Lutheran church, German or Danish or any other kind. And I won’t be churched after the birth, as if there was something dirty about having a baby.

  I won’t have the doctor unless I must. Hansine can see to things. If there are complications she can run and fetch him. If only there were women doctors! I wouldn’t think twice if it was a woman coming into my bedroom in a trim black dress with a stethoscope hanging round her like a smart necklace. But I shake with disgust at having a man there, seeing me so exposed, so vulnerable, my body open and indecent. And I believe men think it funny, doctors or not. You can see that little half-smile on their faces, the way they cover it with a discreet hand. Women are so absurd, they seem to be saying, so weak and foolish, letting this happen to them! How ugly they look and how stupid!

  I went downstairs at last. Hansine was calling the boys in for their supper. My appetite had gone and I couldn’t eat a mouthful. It was the same with all my babies. A few days beforehand I just stop eating. The boys were on the subject of names again. A friend Mogens has made at school told Knud his name is really Canute like a king who sat on the seashore and commanded the waves to stop or the tide to turn or something. He said he would call Knud Canute and all the others at school would and then the boys in the street would start singing ‘Canute, Canute, like an old boot’. So now, as if it weren’t enough Mogens wanting to be Jack, Knud wants to be Kenneth. Apparently, there are four boys in Mogens’ class called Kenneth. I said they must ask their father, which is a sure way of postponing things for months.

  2

  1988. IN OUR SOCIETY, the extended family fast disappearing, one sees one’s cousins only at funerals and then very likely fails to recognize them. The man who came and sat beside me in the church I knew only because he came into the front pew. Only a nephew of the dead woman would do that, so this must be John Westerby. Or his brother Charles?

  I’d seen neither of them since my own mother’s funeral over twenty years before and then only briefly. Business affairs called and both had had to rush away. This man looked smaller than I remembered. He also looked a great deal like Rasmus Westerby whom I had called Morfar. He enlightened me by whispering, ‘Here’s John coming now.’ It must be Charles.

  My other cousin—I only have two—had come with the full panoply of family. The pew was just big enough to hold us all, Charles, John, John’s wife, son, daughter, son-in-law and could it be a grandchild? I was temporarily distracted by trying to remember the names of that son and daughter but had reached no conclusion by the time a voluntary began and six men came in slowly, carrying Swanny’s coffin.

  There must have been a hundred people in the church. They sang up, they all knew the hymn. I hadn’t been able to decide what to have, as far as I knew Swanny had no favourite hymn, but Mrs Elkins had been able to name one. She said that in those last terrible months when she ‘wasn’t herself’, when she was ‘that other one’, Swanny had gone about humming ‘Abide with Me’. So that was what we sang, at full throttle, to the backing of a tape, because organists are hard to find these days.

  I left first. There is a recognized protocol about these things, and John’s son, who seemed to know all about it, deserted his family to walk with me. I murmured that he was very kind and he dipped his head in a formal kind of way. It was no use, I had no memory of his name, still less of what he did or where he lived.

  The tears I hadn’t quite cried seemed to dry up in my eyes. I felt choked. If I remembered her shuffling about that house, humming and mumbling, I was afraid of crying aloud. Instead, as we crowded round the graveside and the coffin was lowered, I made myself think how different it would have been if she had died ten years before. She might easily have done, she was over seventy then.

  But for the diaries all these people wouldn’t have been there. Swanny Kjær (always mispronounced by the media) would have lived and died in obscurity. Who would have been at that woman’s funeral, the woman she might have been? I, certainly, John or Charles but not both, Mr Webber her solicitor and one or two Willow Road neighbours. Harry Duke’s daughter and perhaps her daughter. That’s all. As it is, we had the media and the press. Yes, there is a difference. The media’s representatives would call themselves her friends and perhaps they were, those publishers’ editors and publishers’ publicity people, a crowd from the BBC, a produc
er and a head of features from the independent television company that made the series. The press were there with recording devices and cameras to put it all in the papers.

  How would it have been if they could have seen her in her last days? What a story within a story that would have been. If they could have seen her divided into two by some strange illness of the mind, less and less herself as the other one took over. As it was, some of the young ones had tended to confuse her with her mother. 1905 was as far in the distant past to them as 1880 was. To them she was more the author than the editor of the diaries.

  Their pale unmarked faces glazed with boredom as we processed across the damp grass to the grave someone had hygienically lined with astroturf. After the coffin was lowered one of the Danish cousins, come here all the way from Roskilde, threw in a handful of earth. I identified the woman who followed suit as Margaret Hammond’s daughter, but who the rest were, soiling their sleek gloves with damp London clay, I had no idea. A good many of the women were dressed more for a wedding than a funeral. Their high heels sank into the mushy turf. As we left the graveside it began to rain on their hats.

  I took Mr Webber back to Willow Road in my car and the rest followed—those that were invited, that is. I’d asked her agent and her publisher and the producer but I couldn’t face giving wine and sandwiches to that mob of publicity girls and secretaries, all of them longing to see the inside of the house where Swanny Kjær had lived.

  It’s a nice house, I’d always liked it, but I’d never seen anything remarkable about it until Torben told me it was looked on as one of the best examples of thirties architecture in London. They moved into it when it was new, a few years before I was born. Now, as I unlocked the front door and stepped over the threshold, I caught Mr Webber’s eye. Or, rather, as I tried to catch his, he avoided mine. His face seemed more than usually impassive. I thought, do solicitors really read wills after funerals or is that something that happens only in detective stories?

  Mrs Elkins had prepared food and Sandra who had been Swanny’s secretary had appeared from somewhere and was organizing the drinks. Smoked salmon, white wine and sparkling water—it is always the same wherever you go. I spotted the two nurses, Carol and Clare, and then the relative whose name I couldn’t remember was at my side, telling me he remembered seeing Swanny at his own grandfather’s funeral and how impressed he’d been by the look of her, her height and her beauty.

  ‘I couldn’t believe that was a great-aunt. I was only twelve but I could see how elegant she was and how much better-dressed than the other women.’

  ‘She was different from the rest of the family.’

  ‘In more ways than one,’ he said.

  I knew then that he didn’t know. His father hadn’t told him because his father hadn’t told him. Ken, I remembered, had never believed a word of it. He said suddenly, surprising me, ‘You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that Asta and Rasmus having all those children, they’d have a great many descendants by now, but there’s only us. There’s only me to carry the name on. Aunt Swanny didn’t have any children, Charles hasn’t—and you haven’t, have you?’

  ‘I’ve never been married,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ He blushed a fine rose red.

  That reminded me of how young he must be, that and saying he was only twelve when Ken died. He looked young, of course he did, but his clothes weren’t a young man’s. Until now I’d never seen anyone under fifty in a stranglehold stiff collar and a dark overcoat with a waist. His hair was neatly parted and cut short at back and sides. The blush mantled his face for a good half-minute and by the time it faded Mr Webber was back by my side. He seemed to have constituted himself my protector.

  He stayed until everyone else had gone. I didn’t really notice until they had gone and he was still there. A woman in a big black hat on her way to the door had asked me if there were any more diaries to come and would I be editing them, and another in a grey fur hat, less well-informed, wanted to know (flatteringly, I suppose) if I was Swanny’s granddaughter.

  Mr Webber and I were left alone among Swanny’s things. He said, with great and unexpected sensitivity, articulate as ever, ‘When someone famous dies people tend to forget that those left behind may well feel the same degree of sorrow as, in a like situation, do the nearest and dearest of some obscure person.’

  I said he put it very well.

  ‘They suppose,’ he said, ‘that the well-springs of grief have been desiccated by the fierce light that beats upon the high shore of the world.’

  I smiled uncertainly at him, for that wasn’t at all the way I had thought of Swanny, though many may have. Then we sat down and he took some papers out of his briefcase and told me she had left me everything she had.

  Though the will had yet to be proved, I could have stayed there. Who was there to object? Instead, I went home. To have remained after the news I had had would have overwhelmed me, I should have entered I think one of those strange nervous crises in which it is impossible to keep still, one must wander from room to room, twisting one’s hands, pacing, needing someone to tell it all to but not knowing who that someone might be.

  At home was better. I sat down quietly. I asked myself why I had never thought of this but had supposed I should get a small legacy and the rest would go to the Roskilde relatives. There had been a message from Swanny for me in the will. Mr Webber had read it: ‘… my niece Ann Eastbrook because she is Asta Westerby’s granddaughter in the female line and the only living woman descended from her’. He hadn’t commented on this and neither had I. All it said for me then was that Swanny had loved her mother, which I knew already, and that John and his children were excluded because their descent was through Uncle Ken.

  I should be rich. An authors’ researcher, which is what I was, leads an interesting life but doesn’t make much money. I could, if I wished, go and live in Willow Road. I could give up work if I chose, though I didn’t think I would so choose. I would have money and stock to the extent of about half a million. There would be royalties for years to come. I would possess the four-poster that perhaps, or perhaps not, had belonged to Pauline Bonaparte, the black oak table carved with oak leaves, the Head of a Girl, the ormolu clock, the Bing and Grøndahl Christmas wall-plates, each one different and each one dated, from 1899 to 1986, though excluding the most valuable, the first one of 1898.

  Indeed, I possessed them already. They had been mine since Swanny’s death. Already I owned the limited edition of three differently shaped vases, all white and embossed with crowns and the Royal Arms of Denmark, created for the coronation of Christian X and presented to Torben’s parents on their marriage. The Flora Danica dinner service was mine now and so was the Carl Larsson that hung in Swanny’s drawing room, of the parents and children having tea under the birch trees.

  The diaries were mine too, published and unpublished, printed and still in manuscript, translated and untranslated. Those, I’m sure, are what most people in my position would have thought of first. And if I’d stayed in Swanny’s house I expect I should have been tempted to look for them. Not knowing where Swanny kept the originals, I should have had to find them and do what I had never yet done, look on them alone and touch them.

  Of course, if I’d done that after Mormor died or even fifteen years ago, it would have meant nothing to me. They would just have been an old woman’s jottings, an old woman with no pretensions to being a writer beyond a fondness for telling stories. Since then they had undergone a metamorphosis, not only their contents but the materials of which the notebooks are made too, their physical substance, so that this has somehow been hallowed and taken on the quality of a First Folio or a copy of the Vulgate. Thinking of them made me want to see them. I did the next best thing and went to look at the doll’s house.

  The place I was living in had an exterior room separate from those which comprised the flat. A flight of steps and two landings were between my front door and the door of this room which had its own Banham lock and key. The
previous owner told me with commendable honesty that he had found it quite useless. You couldn’t give it to a guest because in order to reach the bathroom he or she would have to put on a dressing-gown and slippers, let themselves out of one front door, climb a flight of stairs and let themselves into another front door. I said I should find a use for it. It would be somewhere to keep the doll’s house.

  Two or three months had passed since I had last looked at it. Feeling guilty over this neglect, I took a duster down with me, unlocked the door and let myself in. It was early spring and quite dark. I put the light on and closed the door, not wanting to be seen by other tenants passing up the stairs.

  It was stuffy in there because the windows had been kept shut and the blinds down. There was a little black gritty dust on the windowsills but none on the doll’s house. I thought of Swanny, a girl of ten when Morfar began to make it, I thought of her watching him work after my mother had gone to bed and I wondered, by no means for the first time, what she had thought. Had she minded? Had she felt rejected? Or did she consider herself at her age too old for such things and the little sister welcome to it?

  The first page of the first diary had been started a decade before but from then on the diary-writing never stopped for very long, so Mormor must have been setting everything down in her notebook at the time Morfar was carving miniature wood panelling and sculpting tiny stone fireplaces and laying bits of velvet for carpets. I opened the back of the doll’s house and looked into the drawing room where I knew the only books were. The ones in the two bookcases with mica fronts that looked like glass were simply rows of spines painted on to card, but a real book lay on the console table, a tiny object half the size of a postage stamp which nevertheless had real pages and a real leather cover. It was very ingenious, but if you look at it you can see how he has done it, how he cut a half-inch square from the thickness of a notebook—one of hers?—and bound it with a strip of kid glove. Perhaps that was one of hers too. Remembering them, I could imagine her berating him. She never had any time for the doll’s house.