by Ruth Rendell
Swanny longed for her to go, she told me, so that she could have unhindered access to that room. She suspected her brother of some ulterior motive, though what she couldn’t guess, Asta had nothing to give and not much money to leave. Not, at any rate, what he’d call ‘real money’. Swanny’s miseries and the perpetual doubt she lived in had made her mean-spirited, she said. Probably Ken and Maureen were just being kind. Anyway, she didn’t care, she wanted Asta to go but knew better than to encourage her. It was Asta herself who surprised her by suddenly saying that she had never been to Kew Gardens. If she went to Twickenham, to the part where Ken lived, she could walk to Kew Gardens.
Not that she was interested in nature. She knew a rose from other flowers and somewhere in the diaries there’s a bit about beech trees, but also a line that makes it plain she couldn’t identify a horse chestnut. Kew was inviting because she wanted to see what bananas looked like, growing in the hothouse. After she had gone off in Ken and Maureen’s car Swanny went straight upstairs to Asta’s room on the third floor. She said she was compelled to it, as secret drinkers are to their tipple when at last alone, as others may be to masturbation or some fetish, though those words are mine, not hers. But the compulsion made her breathless and rather sick. She was addicted to finding out who she was.
Asta’s room was large, two rooms in fact, divided by double doors which were always open. She had her own bathroom. You could really say she had the whole third floor, for no one used the box room and she could have done so if she chose. I have said I never saw it and I never did until after Swanny herself was dead. Asta didn’t invite people into her domain. She was interested in them but she had no need of them. I never saw it until fourteen years after its occupant quitted it but of course I saw photographs of it in magazines and Sunday supplements, as everyone did who bothers to read features like that. This was the last home of the author of the diaries and therefore—at least, every time a new volume of diaries came out—very much in the news.
It was comfortably, indeed luxuriously, furnished, as was every room in Swanny’s house, but to me it looked bare, it didn’t look lived-in, and Swanny assured me she had changed nothing, added nothing and taken nothing away. Asta hadn’t been a hoarder, she was concerned with life, not the memorabilia of existence. The furniture in the room, the ornaments, were Swanny’s and they had been there before Asta came to live in Willow Road. All that was Asta’s was the Napoleonic bed and the dark polished table with the fruit-and-leaf carvings, the books, the photograph albums and a number of framed photographs, not standing on furniture in the usual way but hung on the walls: a gloomy sepia photograph of Padanaram, apparently taken on a dull day, several portraits of Swanny, my parents’ wedding photo and Swanny’s, a studio portrait of herself when young with a Copenhagen photographer’s name across the bottom right-hand corner and ‘Asta’ scrawled on the left like a pop star’s autograph.
Swanny had already been through Asta’s desk, or perhaps I should say the desk Asta used. If she used the desk. Swanny didn’t know. There was writing paper in the drawers and envelopes, an unused notebook, a surprising number of cheap ballpoint pens. Of course she told me all this with hindsight, she had no idea then of the existence of the diaries. She had no idea that the thick bound notebook lying in the top drawer was the last diary, the one Asta had abandoned two or three years before, had written in it the last line she was ever to write and finally closed it on the evening of September 9th, 1967. Nor did it register with her till long afterwards that September 9th, 1967 was the day after Harry Duke’s funeral.
Naturally, Swanny looked inside it. She was bitterly ashamed of herself but she neglected nothing, she scrutinized everything she could find. The writing was in Danish, which she could read but didn’t bother to when she saw dates in 1966 and 1967. Some years before this, a relative of Torben’s had died and left a diary she had written while living in St Petersburg in 1913. Her husband had been a clerk with the Great Northern Telegraph Company and they had lived there for a year in an hotel. When he heard about it Torben had great hopes of this diary, at last managed to get hold of it and was anticipating a picture of life before the Revolution with all kinds of fascinating political and social comment. It was certainly social. What he had got was nothing more than a pedestrian record of a young woman’s engagements, the parties she went to and the clothes she bought, with a daily commentary on the weather. Swanny remembered this when she had her mother’s last diary in her hands. She read a passage about a bad storm and a tree falling down in the garden next door, and put the book back in the desk.
The wardrobe doors were open as usual, to let the air circulate. There was nothing in there, she had looked before. Still, she looked again. Wincing at what she was doing, she felt in the pockets of coats Asta hadn’t worn for years, delved into ancient handbags. But Asta kept nothing, she didn’t even allow rubbish to accumulate in her handbags as most women do. It wasn’t that she was fastidious or particularly tidy. She didn’t want to be cluttered with the paraphernalia of living.
Swanny’s principal goal was the locked cupboard. The key wasn’t in the lock, so presumably Asta had taken it with her or hidden it somewhere. But this presented no particular problem. There were several lockable cupboards in the house and Swanny was right when she guessed that a key to one would be a key to all. She said she hated what she was doing but at the same time she savoured being alone in the house and knowing no one could interrupt her. I think she was nearly as nervous of Torben discovering her as of Asta. Her husband was a high-principled man, a bit of a stuffed shirt though his niceness counteracted this, and he would have been as deeply shocked to find her searching her mother’s room as if he had come upon her watching a pornographic film.
But poor Torben couldn’t interrupt her. Though recovering and soon to be home again, he was still in hospital. Asta was miles away, heading for Twickenham. Swanny opened the cupboard and found it full of clothes.
As far as she could tell these were much the same sort of clothes as in the wardrobe, only older. They smelt powerfully of camphor. Since Asta didn’t hoard and seemed to be without a trace of sentimentality, Swanny concluded she must have kept them in the hope of their returning to fashion one day. In fact, they would have done so, for in the year of Asta’s death ankle-length skirts came in. These dresses and ‘costumes’ dated from the Great War and earlier and there were one or two beaded confections from the twenties. Swanny was deeply disappointed. As it happened she was wrong about Asta’s motives. She intended to sell the contents of the cupboard and actually did so a few months later, having found a shop in St John’s Wood High Street that specialized in satisfying the new passion for antique clothes. She sold them and made a tidy sum, once more demonstrating her gifts as a woman of business.
Swanny found nothing more, no letters, no documents. She said she went into her own bedroom after that and contemplated her birth certificate. This wasn’t, of course, the first time she had looked at it since the arrival of the letter. It was more like the hundredth time. But she looked at it now and saw once again that her birth had been registered on August 21st, 1905, at 55 Sandringham Road, Dalston, the Registrar’s Office for the South-west Hackney District. Her name was there as Swanhild (the other names, Rasmus’s choice, had not yet been added), her father given as Rasmus Peter Westerby, engineer, aged thirty-one, and her mother as Asta Birgit Westerby, nee Kastrup, aged twenty-five. The Registrar had signed the certificate as Edward Malby.
It was all beyond her understanding.
10
THE DAY BEFORE I was due to meet Cary and take her to look at the diaries I went up to Willow Road to see for myself. It was years since I had seen for myself, fourteen years in fact since Swanny showed me the originals.
I wasn’t able to park the car anywhere near the house but had to drive round and round before resigning myself to leaving the car on what seemed the only vacant place in Hampstead, half a mile away in Pond Street. I don’t think I would have r
ecognized Gordon Westerby among the crowd of commuters coming out from Hampstead Heath Station. I wouldn’t have given him a second glance if he hadn’t hailed me so enthusiastically.
The weather was much warmer than on that dreary April day when we had first met at Swanny’s funeral and he had made his own concessions to it. But these were in the direction of lightness, not informality. Although it wasn’t raining, rain wasn’t forecast and there had been none for a week, he was wearing a raincoat, the kind of thing you see on detective inspectors in television police procedurals. His collar was as high as at the funeral but less stiff and evidently part of a blue-and-white-striped shirt that matched a plain blue tie. Also matching each other were his glossy black shoes and briefcase.
‘I hoped I’d run into you,’ he said. He spoke very earnestly as if a chance encounter was the only means open to us of getting together. The posts didn’t exist, the telephone hadn’t been invented. ‘I’m very glad to see you.’
‘But what are you doing here?’ I said, half-amused, half-puzzled. Was he on his way to Willow Road?
‘I live here.’ He seemed a little worried by my surprise. ‘I have a half-share in a flat in Roderick Road. Did you think I lived with my parents?’
I hadn’t thought about it at all. I’d scarcely thought about him. Evidently he didn’t expect an answer but said confidentially, inclining his head closer, ‘When I came out of the closet it was naturally an embarrassment to them. The kindest thing was to move out. We’re on extremely good terms, you mustn’t think otherwise.’
I assured him I wouldn’t but I did wonder why, living where he did, he’d never been to see his great-aunt.
‘That family tree I mentioned to you, I had this rather brilliant idea. There are going to be more diaries published, aren’t there?’
Yes, certainly, I said. Next year or the year after.
‘Only when I’ve done my tree, it could go in. Go in the book, I mean. And when they reissue past editions it could go in those too. What do you think?’
He levelled at me an earnest, intense, scrutinizing stare. His eyes were Asta’s, but the shade was paler, faintly diluted. If hers were oil his were watercolour.
‘I’ve bought the diaries in paperback. I’ve never read them, you see. It will be a weekend treat for me. My friend that I share with and I, we very much like reading aloud to each other.’
I asked him if he needed help with the tree. By no means all the details of Asta’s and Rasmus’s forebears and connections were to be found in the diaries but I thought I could fill in the gaps.
‘I’ve been relying on you,’ he said. ‘I was sure you’d say that. My father knows nothing. I’ve noticed how women are interested in families and men not at all. I’m always coming across that when I’m in pursuit of my hobby.’ For the first time he smiled, showing a double row of large Bertie Wooster-like teeth. ‘We’ll get together,’ he said, remarked that it had been nice meeting me and set off rapidly in the direction of Gospel Oak.
Swanny’s house, for I still thought of it like that, seemed peculiarly silent but it was warm and fresh-smelling. That gleaming quality it had always held for me was still there, the sensation a little like walking into a jewel box. Swanny and Torben had had so much silver and brass, so much glass in ornaments and on chandeliers, that the rooms never seemed still but always filled with tiny moving lights. At all times of the day and night that glitter in various forms was present, the moon-shaped shine on the curve of a vase, the burnish on bowl and cup, the flash on the facet of a prism, the bright running spot made by the reflection from cut glass. In the absence of sunshine all this gleam and glitter was muted. It had become subtle and expectant as if it waited for the rain to cease and the dark to lift.
Torben had always kept a room downstairs as his study. I don’t know what he studied there, or read or wrote, come to that, he must have had plenty of room for that kind of thing at his Embassy, but men of his kind always did have studies while women had sewing rooms. After his death it remained empty until Swanny took it over for her own purposes. She always called it her room, with a slight emphasis on the second word. It was in there that she was photographed when the Sunday Times made her the subject of one of their A Life in the Day of series.
I’d often been in the study and I knew Asta’s notebooks weren’t there. Swanny had added a word processor and a photocopier to Torben’s rather austere appointments, his fountain pen and blotter and Crown Derby inkwell. The house contained a lot of books, several thousands probably, and most of them were in the study that was very nearly a book-lined room. The three volumes published as Asta, A Live Thing in a Dead Room, and Bright Young Middle-Age Swanny had rather self-consciously displayed on shelves in all the languages into which they had been translated, Icelandic being the most recent of these. Hanging up on the wall in a frame of pale polished wood was the (much enlarged) facsimile page from the first notebook.
Swanny had hob-nobbed with publishers and met eminent writers at parties, been an honoured guest at her agent’s and been on promotional tours, but she had never quite attained the true book person’s attitude to books, a total familiarity with them, an indifference to their exteriors and commitment to what lies between the covers. She never lost that certain reverence she had for a published book. So a first edition of Asta, boxed in a presentation case, stood propped up on her desk, partly propped in fact by the Gyldendal limited edition in D format and lavishly illustrated, while bound but uncorrected proof copies, even those numbered one in the run, were relegated to the lowest tier of the bookshelves that filled the wall facing the desk.
I’ve said that the notebooks, the originals of the diaries, weren’t there. What I meant was that the notebooks weren’t, and had never been, anywhere visible. I looked through the desk drawers, on the off-chance, having the shadow of that feeling Swanny had when she raided and riffled through Asta’s room. Swanny, however, hadn’t gone as Asta had to see a relative in Twickenham. Swanny was dead. A pang assailed me, I closed the drawers and sat there unseeing of limited editions and presentation copies, thinking of her frantic efforts and of the peculiar predicament of the seeker after truth who is aware that the one person who knows what it is will never be made to divulge it.
Torben had had another heart attack six months later and died of it. With his death Swanny entered the nadir of her life, perhaps indeed her only really low ebb, for as she said to me after the tide had turned for her and for a while washed away much of her misery, she had been a happy woman, a sheltered, protected, indulged and loved woman. Apart from feeling so deeply the death of her brother Mogens when she was eleven, she had known no sorrow.
It had always meant much to her that she was openly declared to be her mother’s favourite child. Torben’s passion and his enduring devotion had placed her in a position of privilege. She told me that she lived daily with the certain knowledge of her husband’s worship, that when he came home to her each evening it was with a young lover’s breathless excitement, hurrying the last few yards to be there a fraction sooner, that when he and she were in a room full of people the faces of those others were always faint or vague to him, while hers shone with clarity. He told her all this.
Neither of them had much wanted children and when no children came he told her he was glad because he would have been jealous. But it wasn’t jealousy that made him dislike her mother. The cause was quite other. What he called her senility, but couldn’t understand or allow for, had led her to make Swanny unhappy with her lies and fictions. That he could never overlook.
He loved Swanny with the hungry desire he first felt at the age of twenty-two when he saw her across that room in Copenhagen. In one of those letters that Asta had never seen but boasted about at parties, he had told Swanny that if she wouldn’t finally agree to marry him he would die a virgin. Apparently he had never made love to a woman and never would unless it was to her, had ‘saved himself’ for her, to be as ‘pure’ as she, talking of it in the way people presuma
bly did then and which seems so ridiculous to us now. There was something Wagnerian about Torben Kjær, and not only in his height and his Nordic appearance.
Swanny got out those letters and re-read them over and over, staining them, she said, with many tears. The tears were as much from guilt as grief, she confessed to me, for she felt she had never fully appreciated Torben while he was alive. She had never loved him as he loved her. But this may be true of any relationship in which one party loves as passionately and as wholly as that. Human beings, it appears, are capable of almost limitless ardour but not of a matching level of response. Swanny used to say in her misery that it’s better to be the one that kisses than the one that turns the cheek. It’s always better to be the active than the passive, the doer than the done to. She had sometimes been impatient with Torben’s transports.
But now she grieved. She even said she realized only now he was gone how much she had really loved him. She was unwise enough to say this to her mother—but who else, after all, had she to talk to for most of the time?—and Asta was derisive. Of course she had loved him: was she mad? What woman wouldn’t love a man who gave her so much, was so good to her, wrote such letters, was handsome, generous and kind, she Asta should have had such a man, and so on, and so on.
I began paying a regular weekly visit to Willow Road at this time, usually to have an evening meal with Swanny. As well as her grief, she had an increase of arthritis to bear (another cause of wonder and near-disbelief in Asta) and had begun on a series of painful gold injections. Her knees always hurt her now, the joints of her fingers had begun to show swelling. She had lost weight and grown gaunt. No one who saw her then, on those Wednesday or Thursday evenings, when she would cook for me but herself barely eat, would for a moment have foreseen the woman she would become in the eighth decade of her life.
I visited regularly but until Swanny’s last illness I seldom went upstairs. Mounting the stairs now I asked myself where to start. I knew only that Swanny’s bedroom was the big one in the front over the drawing room but I couldn’t imagine her keeping the notebooks in there. In Asta’s own room, then? As I climbed the two higher flights I wondered again at her choice of the third floor and asked myself how a woman of ninety had managed those stairs several times each day while I, more than forty years younger, found it arduous to climb them once. No doubt, she had enjoyed being isolated up here. Like most writers she alternated extreme gregariousness with a powerful physical need for solitude.
