Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  For one thing, he won’t like the baby’s name. He’ll say it’s a Norwegian name and it is, but so what? Just because he has a lot of stupid prejudices and despises the Norwegians. I expect he will want her called Vibeke after his ugly old mother. Even if he makes me have her christened Vibeke or Dagmar I’ll still call her Swanhild. And when I cuddle her and put her to the breast I’ll call her Swanny. There’s no one can stop another person calling someone what she wants.

  I’ve loved the name since I was a young girl and read the Volsunga Saga. Svanhild was the daughter of Gudrun and Sigurd Fafnersbane. When Gudrun killed her second husband, Atle, she tried to drown herself but the waves took her to a land where King Jonakr ruled. She married him and Svanhild grew up at his court and was later wooed by the mighty King Jormunrek.

  He sent his son Randver to ask for her hand in marriage, she accepted and followed him home on his ship. But Bikke, the evil servant, tried to persuade her to take him for her husband instead and when she refused told Jormunrek she had been unfaithful.

  Jormunrek hanged his son and sentenced Svanhild to be trampled to death by wild horses, but the horses could not touch her so long as they could see her beautiful eyes. Bikke blindfolded her and then nothing could stop the horses. There were more terrible revenges and Wotan came into it all somewhere. I was romantic when I was young and I liked the idea of beauty taming wild beasts. It’s all so ancient too, lost in the mists of antiquity, as Onkel Holger says, a favourite phrase of his.

  September 1st, 1905

  We weighed Swanhild on the kitchen scales this morning, Hansine and I. They belong to the man who owns this house and they weigh in pounds and ounces, not kilograms. It sounds strange to me, nine pounds, two ounces, it doesn’t mean anything much, but it must be all right because it’s a lot more than when she was weighed at the chemist’s a month ago. I’m proud of her. I love her. I like writing that down because a few weeks ago, if anyone had asked me and asked me to be really honest, I’d have said I don’t love anyone in the world.

  I’m only twenty-five and I could honestly have said I felt love for no one. I thought I’d love my husband when I married him but that didn’t last five minutes. In fact, it was over that first night when he hurt me so and I thought he was a madman who was trying to kill me. I get worried about the boys if they’re ill or I can’t find them in the street but I don’t care about being with them. The truth is, they bore me. You can’t call that loving. As for my father and Tante Frederikke, they’re just old people who heaved sighs of relief when I was safely married and out of the way.

  The friends I had at school have all disappeared. Well, they got married too. When women get married they’ve no time for friendship. A woman I talked to before I came to this country told me her husband was her best friend. I ask you! So I’d come to the conclusion I didn’t love anyone and it frightened me a bit, thinking like that. It seemed wrong, it seemed wicked, even though I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t anything I’d done but just something which was.

  As I wrote that last word Swanhild started crying upstairs. She always cries at the right time, when my breasts are getting uncomfortable and too heavy with milk.

  I’m coming!

  October 15th, 1905

  The trial has begun of the man who murdered his wife in Navarino Road. Hansine is fascinated by all of it. She has begged me to read the account of it to her from the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette but of course I won’t. I didn’t know these people and I don’t want to read about them. The next thing was that I came upon her asking Mogens to read it to her. He can read anything, both in Danish and English, I think he’s going to be a bright boy, but naturally I said no, on no account. I’ve told her not to mention anything about that trial or those people in this house. I was so fierce I frightened her. Anyway, she was quiet.

  Rasmus might murder me if he knew everything about me, if he knew everything that goes on in my heart. For that’s where I’m free, free to be myself, to do as I like, to think as I wish and not pretend. There are no noisy schoolboys there and no screaming baby—not that I’m complaining about Swanny, she’s the best thing in my life—no chattering thick-headed maid and no absent wandering husband who may be anywhere.

  I know he’s all right, though. More money has come, another 500 kroner, so we’re safe and can pay the rent and eat plenty of good food. We shall have a fat goose for Christmas and a kransekage. As soon as the money was in my hand I went to Matthew Rose’s store and bought material to make clothes for Swanny. I haven’t written in this diary for days because I’ve been sewing, doing drawn thread work and making fine tucks on her long gowns.

  This afternoon Mrs Gibbons called to see me. I think she only comes here to find out if I’ve really got a husband, she’s always asking about him. First she wanted to know when Swanny was going to be christened. She’s very religious (though that doesn’t stop her laughing at my accent) and she’s always hob-nobbing with the curate at St Philip’s. I said, never, I didn’t believe in god. (See how I write it with a small g.) ‘I don’t believe in god,’ I said, ‘or any of that. It’s all the invention of ministers and vicars.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she says, ‘you shock me, you really do.’

  She didn’t look shocked, she looked greedy for more. So I gave it her.

  ‘You people talk about god being a loving father,’ I said, ‘but even a bad father wouldn’t kill his daughter’s babies.’

  She gave me a funny look because I had Swanny on my lap. My right hand was under her head and my left hand lying lightly on her chest and I could see Mrs Gibbons start looking at my hand. She’s so plain you really want to laugh. For one thing she’s very stout and the way her corsets push up the top half of her and push down the lower part makes her look like a parcel that’s tied up in the middle with too tight a string. What makes it worse is that her dress is just like brown paper, creased the way brown paper is, and pleated like a parcel where you fold in the edges.

  She lifted her eyes and then looked very pointedly back at my hand.

  ‘You don’t wear a wedding ring, Mrs Westerby.’

  I hate the way she pronounces my name, but they all do it that way here, so I suppose I must get used to it. I drew out my other hand from under Swanny’s soft furry head and held it out to her the way you might hold out your hand for some man to kiss. Not that I know any men who would.

  ‘That’s on your right hand,’ she said. ‘Is it your mother’s?’

  ‘We wear our wedding rings on our right hands in Denmark,’ I said very coldly.

  She wasn’t put out, she wouldn’t be. ‘I’d change it over if I were you. If you don’t want people talking.’

  It’s too big for that finger. One’s right hand is always a bit bigger than one’s left, I suppose. Anyway, I’ve changed it over even if it does slither up and down. I wouldn’t care if it were just me but I have to think of the children and it’s not fair on them if people think I’m not respectable.

  Reading over what I’ve written I can see there’s a line that really shouldn’t be there. But who’s going to read it? It’s in Danish and Danish might as well be Hottentot for all the people round here understand a word of it.

  October 23rd, 1905

  Autumn has come and all the leaves are turning. I love the trees with leaves that are five-fingered and bright gold and the fruit that hangs on them like apples with spikes, though I miss the beeches. I haven’t seen a beech tree since I came to England.

  Another visit from Mrs Gibbons with more nosiness and impertinent questions. If we were Danish how did it happen we had an English name?

  ‘It’s not English,’ I said. ‘It’s pronounced Vest-er-bew.’

  She gave a funny little laugh to indicate she didn’t believe me. It is odd the way the same letters can be pronounced so differently. When I first came here I kept saying to myself that I wanted to see Hootha Park, and was I surprised when I found out how they pronounce Hyde here! I’m glad I never said Hootha aloud.r />
  The sky was a very pale blue yesterday but today the fog has come back. The fog is thick and yellow and I’m not surprised the people here call it a pea-souper. Still, it reminded me of pea soup, the kind made with a ham bone and yellow split peas we used to have when we lived in Sweden, so I got Hansine to make some and we all had it for supper. Well, not all, not Swanny, who still just has me and thrives.

  October 25th, 1905

  A letter yesterday from Tante Frederikke, the first for more than two months. The Thorvaldsens had a memorial service for Oluf which, I agree with her, seems very affected for a boy aged fifteen. They never recovered his body from the sea. There were lots on the Georg Stage that were never found. I can’t imagine how that would feel, to know you have a child and next day you haven’t any more, you’ve nothing, not even a dead body. It doesn’t seem right, though I know few people would agree with me, this training children to fight at sea, for that is what it amounts to, training fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds to be soldiers on ships. It’s even worse than training girls of sixteen to be wives.

  I’ve discovered that if you don’t want to dream of something the best way to stop it is to think about it very hard before you go to sleep at night. You’d think that was the way to make you dream of it but the reverse is true. So I made myself think of Swanny being taken away from me and hidden somewhere and me having nothing of her, not even a picture. It won’t happen, it can’t happen but it made my pillow wet with my tears. Still, it worked and I dreamed of Rasmus coming back and saying we all had to go to Australia and me agreeing like a good little lamb. Well, dreams don’t have much relation to reality, I must say.

  Coal fires have started. I expect the smoke from so many of them makes the fog worse but I like the red coals and the bright flames in my grate in the drawing room at night. It’s not really cold, not the way it was in Stockholm. I wonder what Mrs Gibbons would say if I told her how the wolves used to come down from the hills there when the snow was deep. They were starving and howling for food and one night they ate my washing off the clothesline. I suppose she wouldn’t believe me or else she’d ask if the polar bears came too.

  November 2nd, 1905

  I am writing this upstairs in the boys’ room with the door locked. It’s bitterly cold and I’ve got mittens on and my feet in a footwarmer Tante Frederikke made for me about a hundred years ago. I could ask Hansine to light a fire in the grate but she would only start on how there’s a wonderful fire already in the drawing room and it’s as warm as toast downstairs etcetera.

  The secrecy will have to start now, I suppose. Well, I know. It amuses me when I think about it, how elaborately I will have to keep my best and favourite activity a dark secret the way other women hide a clandestine love affair. I only have love affairs with a notebook! But I want him to know about it as little as some other woman would want her husband to know about the men she spent her time with. They are her passion, this is mine. We can’t all be the same, can we?

  Swanny is lying in my lap, wrapped up in shawls, but although I feel cold my body is warm to the touch and that’s what keeps her warm. She’s fast asleep, clean and sweet and full of good milk. Her hair is the same gold as my wedding ring. People say a baby’s cheek is like a rose leaf but that’s not what they really think, that’s what they get out of books. A baby’s cheek is like a plum, firm as fruit, soft and hard at the same time, as smooth and as cool.

  Last evening I was sitting in the drawing room, not writing in my diary but mending Knud’s sailor suit. His trouser pockets were full of the cigarette cards they are both mad about collecting. ‘Look at this, Knud,’ I said, ‘suppose they’d gone into the tub when Mrs Clegg comes round on Monday to do our washing.’ He wouldn’t answer me, he wouldn’t even look round. He says he won’t answer unless I call him Ken. If you don’t answer me you’ll get a smack you won’t forget, I said, so we are at loggerheads, Knud not speaking to me unless I call him Ken and I adamantly refusing to do any such thing.

  What he needs is a father’s discipline. I was just thinking this—not to mention how Rasmus would give them an inexhaustible supply of cigarette cards, he smokes so much—when there came a smart double knock at the front door. Hansine went to answer it and I heard her give a great scream. What a charming parlourmaid she makes! Anyway, the drawing-room door flew open and in walked my husband.

  I got up and the sewing fell on the floor. Not a word of warning, not a letter for weeks, and then he just walks in one night.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ he said.

  ‘At last,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t seem very pleased to see me.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You might at least give a fellow a kiss.’

  I put up my face and he kissed me and I kissed him back. What else could I do in the circumstances? He certainly is good-looking. I’d half-forgotten that, I’d forgotten the feeling of a little shiver inside me. It’s not love, it’s more like being hungry and I don’t know what to call it.

  ‘Come and see what I’ve brought,’ he said, and I’m such a fool, I never learn, I really thought for a moment he meant presents for us, toys maybe for Mogens and Knud. And I never get over my longing for a fur coat, though I’m sure I’ll never get one. Just at that moment I honestly thought he might have brought me a fur coat.

  So I went out into the hall with him but there was nothing there. He threw open the front door and pointed out into the street. There’s a lamp right outside our house, so I could make it out all right. Besides, he’d already stuck an oil lamp on the road next to it so that it wouldn’t get bumped into by a cart.

  A motor car. A big one with spokes on its wheels like a bicycle, only four of them. ‘She’s a Hammel,’ he said, ‘made in Denmark. Isn’t she beautiful?’

  It was freezing out there, so we went back indoors and he was talking motors before he’d even got his coat off. What he really wants is to get hold of the kind called an Oldsmobile, an American machine. He said they made 5,000 of them last year, which made me laugh because it’s so absurd. He always exaggerates everything. Five thousand, I said, you wouldn’t be able to move along the roads. Automobiles, he said, that’s what they call them over there, and he gave them a lot of other names, oleo locomotive and motorig and diamote among others, with a look of adoration on his face that he’s never had for me.

  I thought he’d soon be back with that old idea that we all decamp and set off for America, land of the three-horsepower curved-dash automobile, so when I’d listened to a whole lot more of this stuff and rubbish about the Duryea Brothers and someone called James Ward Packard, I asked him if he’d like to see his daughter.

  ‘I daresay I’d better,’ was what he said. Charming!

  She was asleep. But she woke up when we came in and he saw her open her beautiful dark-blue eyes.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said, and, ‘Where does she get that colour hair from?’

  ‘All Danes are fair,’ I said.

  ‘Except you and me,’ he said with a funny sort of laugh.

  I can always tell when he really means something or when he’s just what he calls ‘joking’. He was joking then, he didn’t seriously mean to imply anything.

  ‘Her name is Swanhild,’ I said, pronouncing it the English way, knowing how he likes anything English.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘for making up your mind without consulting me.’

  I said he hadn’t been here to be consulted and we quarrelled a bit the way we invariably do. But he didn’t say any more about her not looking like us. If I know him he knows me and he knows I’d never be unfaithful to him, he knows I’d see that as just about the worst thing a woman can do. We women don’t have to be brave and strong or good at earning money like men and if we are it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count. We have to be chaste. That’s the only word I can think of that expresses what I mean. That’s where our honour is, in being chaste, pure in our behaviour and faithful to our husbands. I must say it would be easier if one had a nice loving husband
but that’s life!

  November 6th, 1905

  When I first started writing this diary I told myself I’d write down only the absolute truth. Now I understand that’s not possible. It wouldn’t be possible for anyone, not just me. All I can do is be honest about what I feel, I can do that, what I feel and what I believe in. Total openness about facts I can’t manage and I’ve given up arguing with myself about it. I needn’t tell lies but I can’t tell the whole truth.

  Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day. They just as often call it Bonfire Day and when I heard that I thought it must be the way they celebrate St Nicholas, though that’s a month away. But the English always do things differently from everyone else and I shouldn’t really have been surprised to hear (from the vicar) that November the 5th is all about some man who tried to blow up the King of England and got hanged for it. Now, for some unaccountable reason, they make a big doll and burn it on the anniversary of the day. Why not hang it? I suppose burning is more exciting.

  Rasmus bought fireworks for the boys and we had a bonfire, though we didn’t have a Guy Fawkes. I promised to make one for them next year. They are all over Rasmus, they love him for his cigarette cards and the motor car, he is all in all to them, and poor Mor is nowhere.

  November 21st, 1905

  Hooray! Prince Charles of Denmark has been elected King of Norway.

  For two days I’ve thought I was in the family way again but it was a false alarm, thank goodness. No man can know what that’s like, the waiting and the hoping and the despair from hour to hour, from minute to minute, and the relief when you’re unwell. It’s only been a bit delayed. I suppose there’s nothing else that can happen to you that’s quite like it. Knowing you’re going to have a baby can be the worst thing in the world for some women and the best thing for others, an enormous joy or the most appalling blow, and there’s no middle way. I’ve never come across a woman who said she was rather pleased to be having a baby or rather sorry. No, it’s bliss or horror but more often horror.