Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  He had a small child with him, a child whose normal bedtime was 6.30 p.m., yet he chose a train which was not scheduled to reach its destination until four minutes after that time, and in the event caught one two hours later, necessitating an arrival in Cambridge at twenty to ten. No doubt he had his reasons.

  In the morning the child Edith came downstairs at eight and Florence gave her breakfast. This was not at all an unusual proceeding, though one which was not particularly pleasing to Florence who had the work of the house and the shopping to do. The non-appearance of Mrs Roper and Mrs Hyde caused her no great surprise as it was often their habit to lie in bed until noon, but after she had washed Edith and dressed her she sent her upstairs. The little fair-haired girl clambering up the first flight of stairs at Devon Villa, Navarino Road, Hackney, was the last sight Florence Fisher ever had of Edith Roper. Indeed, it was the last known sighting of her in this world.

  Florence went out shopping at about ten. It was warm and close, though less hot than it had been. However, such heat as there was seems to have affected her adversely, for when after about two hours she returned, no doubt laden with groceries, she had begun to feel ill.

  There appeared to be no one in the house. She dragged herself upstairs to the first-floor bedroom in which was the cot where Edith slept. She found the room in some disarray—again a not unusual event. Doubtless wearily, she stripped the cot of sheets and blankets soaked in urine. It was perhaps natural to assume that in her absence Mrs Roper and Edith had left for Cambridge. If she had not been ill herself at this time, Florence might have been more curious about the whereabouts of Maria Hyde and suspicious of circumstances in which Lizzie Roper and her daughter had gone away, not for a holiday but permanently, without taking any of Edith’s clothes with them. But she was ill. Possibly she was suffering from a form of heatstroke. Whatever it was, she was obliged to take to her bed in the basement at Devon Villa and to remain there for the next two days.

  Then followed a period of more than a week in which Florence Fisher was alone in Navarino Road. During that time she continued to suppose that Mr and Mrs Roper and the children were in Cambridge. If she worried at all, it would not have been about them but her own future. Would one of them return to pay her wages? Or was she expected to have left their employment and therefore to receive no further wages? Then there was the question of the absence of Mrs Hyde. In all the ten years Florence had been in this house Mrs Hyde had never spent a night away from it. On the other hand, since she and her daughter had always lived together, so far as Florence knew, the likeliest explanation was that she too had gone to Cambridge and was even now there with her daughter and son-in-law.

  Florence went about her business. She was soon recovered and returned to her duties. July 28th was a Friday and it is known, from the agency’s records, that on the following Thursday, August 3rd, she called at Miss Elizabeth Newman’s Servants’ Agency in Mare Street in quest of another situation. Probably she had some contact with the man to whom she was engaged. Tradesmen called. The knife grinder was due and no doubt he came. The baker made his daily delivery.

  It was months since Florence had been up to the top floor at Devon Villa, but she was in the habit of giving a sweep and dust to the one below it every week. Mounting the first flight of stairs on the morning of Friday, August 4th with mop and duster, the first time she had been up there since two days before Roper’s departure, she smelt a powerful and terrible odour she had never smelt before. She went up the second flight. She paused on the landing, no doubt considerably daunted. The smell here was ten times worse than on the stairs. Florence tied her clean duster over her mouth and nose before she opened the door of the first bedroom.

  This was the bedroom Lizzie Roper had shared with her husband. However, it was the body of Mrs Hyde which lay spread out face-downwards on the floor between the bed and the door. It was fully clothed but the hair was partly in curl papers. Clad only in a thin white cotton nightgown, the body of Lizzie Roper lay on, rather than in, the bed, which was covered with a whitish counterpane. Both bodies, the bed and bedclothes and the women’s night-clothes, the carpet and to some extent the walls, were splashed or soaked with blood. Lizzie Roper’s throat had been cut from ear to ear.

  On a table was the tray with the two cups that had contained tea as well as the half-empty sugar basin, a three-quarters-empty bottle of gin and two glasses. A week had passed and the remains of the salmon had rotted. The curtains were closed, the air thick and fetid and the room full of flies which wheeled and buzzed about the bodies and the rancid food.

  Florence touched nothing beyond closing the door she had opened. She went downstairs, put on her hat and walked to the police station in Kingsland Road where she saw Sub-Divisional Inspector Samuel Parlett and told him of her discovery. Two police officers accompanied her back to Navarino Road.

  An account of Alfred Roper’s trial appears in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that at the inquest a verdict was returned of murder with malice aforethought and that on the following day Alfred Roper was arrested in Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire, and charged with his wife’s murder. He appeared on the following morning at the North London Police Court before the magistrate Edward Snow Fordham where he was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

  Astonishingly, no violence had been done to Maria Hyde. Cause of death was cardiac arrest, brought on by natural causes. Maria Hyde had for years complained of having a bad heart which might at any moment carry her off, and it seems she was right. The assumption was made—and it is difficult to find an alternative solution—that she was either a witness to her daughter’s death or that she discovered the body and the effect on her was to stop her heart.

  But had Maria Hyde also witnessed the killing of fourteen-month-old Edith? The child had disappeared. A search was mounted, residents of every house in an area bounded by Graham Road, Queensbridge Road, Richmond Road and Mare Street were questioned, the boating lake in Victoria Park was dragged and part of the Grand Union Canal. Although there was no sign of disturbance of the soil, the garden at Devon Villa was dug over to a depth of four feet. Local people joined in the search of London Fields and Hackney Downs and the hunt for Edith spread to Hackney Marshes.

  It was all in vain. Edith Roper had disappeared and was never to be found, alive or dead.

  13

  THE PROMISED SUCCEEDING CHAPTER may have been written but it wasn’t enclosed in Cary’s package. Still, I was not to be obliged to forgo the trial. It had been written about, perhaps because Roper’s acquittal was one of the early triumphs of the K C, Howard de Filippis, in the Penguin Famous Trials series. The green paperback, which also contained accounts of the cases of Crippen, Oscar Slater, George Lamson, Madeleine Smith and Buck Ruxton, had no illustrations. But its cover was a collage of photographic images of the subjects, and there, hovering like a medium’s fabricated ghost between Crippen in his high stiff collar and pretty, relentless Madeleine, was Alfred Roper, dark and cadaverous, resembling more than anyone Abraham Lincoln. The book and Arthur Roper’s memoir I put aside, not even sure if I ever intended reading them. I had my own work to do as well as answering all those letters of condolence.

  Paul Sellway’s was the first I replied to. It wasn’t a long letter I wrote him but I did mention the diaries and, for something to say, that I now wished my mother had spoken Danish to me as a child so that I had some grasp of it and I added a question I intended as rhetorical: was it the same for him or had he been luckier and had either Hansine or his mother ensured he was bilingual? This letter was to have interesting consequences.

  Gordon Westerby, my first cousin once removed, took no more than a week before following up our conversation outside Hampstead Heath Station. He didn’t phone, he wrote.

  It was a beautifully executed formal letter, more the product of desk-top publishing than a typewriter, and he signed himself ‘yours sincerely’. He had read the diaries and much enjoyed them. They had convinced him, if he needed
convincing, that all that was lacking was a family tree to be set among the endpapers. Did I think this idea would find favour (his words) with the publishers of the diaries?

  Could I tell him the Christian names of Morfar’s parents? Would it be too much to ask for their dates? Was Tante Frederikke Asta’s mother’s sister or her father’s? Who was Onkel Holger? Would I come to dinner with him and Aubrey in Roderick Road? On the 5th, 6th, 7th, 12th, 14th or 15th?

  He could have asked Swanny these questions and I wondered why he hadn’t. She had been ignorant about the Westerby history while Mormor was alive but after she was dead and the diaries came into her hands she set out to solve puzzles herself, looked up records while she was in Denmark and met the pastor of the church where Asta and Rasmus had been married.

  These were not matters which found their way into the diaries. Mormor had never been interested in her forebears. She hadn’t bothered to label the photographs in the albums with names or dates. If she knew who Rasmus’s grandmother was or why the members of her own family were scattered across Sweden as well as Denmark, she had forgotten. In her extreme old age she had forgotten almost everything.

  For the last year of her life Mormor lived alone with Swanny in Willow Road. She was ninety-three and she seemed to have all her faculties. She still wore glasses only for reading, had no hearing difficulties and was as agile as ever. But she had lost her memory.

  What often happens to very old people is that they have no memory of recent events but almost perfect recall of things that happened sixty or seventy years in the past. This wasn’t true of Asta. In her mind the past was either lost or terribly distorted, so that she would confuse the stories she told, mixing up the one about going to the orphanage with the one about mushroom poisoning. The result was a garbled tale of her cousin going to the orphanage on her own and returning home to find her husband dead of fungus toxins.

  Of course, Torben had been saying she was senile for years. It hadn’t been true but it came true once he was dead. Asta talked nonsense and almost nothing but nonsense. This would have been less painful to watch and listen to if she had been physically decrepit. But she looked no more than seventy, she could still walk a mile without hardship and climb the stairs without stopping. She still read her Dickens, did her fine sewing, her drawn thread work and petit point and the task she had not long embarked on of embroidering Swanny’s monogram on every piece of linen she possessed. From this work she would look up and come out with an anecdote that was a fabrication but in the heart of which was a tiny thread of fact. For example, the polar bear story which forms the first lines of the first diary had become fact to her and she would recount how she and her mother, while walking in Østerbrogade on a bitter winter’s day, had seen one of these animals gazing in at the window of a butcher’s shop.

  Strangely, the last thing I remember her ever saying to me was quite lucid, a story I had never heard before. Swanny was there and I don’t think Swanny had ever heard it either.

  I was making one of my evening visits—rarer since Daniel Blain had come to live with me—and Asta was, as usual, reclining on the sofa, reading. Something she read may have recalled this to her. It’s possible she simply invented it.

  She began laughing softly. She lifted her head, took off her glasses and said, ‘We had this maid called Emily. We had Hansine too and we also had this Emily who was English. She was a very stupid girl but she meant well. You remember Bjørn, don’t you, lille Swanny?’

  Swanny looked amazed. She said, yes, of course she did.

  ‘When we gave Bjørn his food,’ Asta said, ‘we’d always say, Spis dit brød.’

  ‘ “Eat your food,” ’ Swanny said for my benefit, though my Danish was adequate for that.

  ‘I came upon this silly girl feeding Bjørn and holding out the dish to him and saying, “Beastly boy, beastly boy.” ’

  Asta chortled and Swanny managed a doubtful smile. I suppose spis dit brød does sound a bit, a very little bit, like ‘beastly boy’. God knows it might have done if the girl took Morfar for her exemplar. Asta went off into a rambling tale of her childhood and I went home to Daniel. Only Daniel wasn’t there, he was meeting Cary somewhere, and soon after that he had left me and gone to Cary.

  I’ve said this isn’t my story. The difficulty with that is that it’s I who tell it and the things that happened to me affect it. Perhaps it’s enough to say that Daniel was the only man I had actually ever lived with, as distinct from spending weekends with or going home with overnight. And that, while Asta before she grew senile had seemed to take this as normal behaviour, Swanny had deeply disapproved. She wanted me to regularize things by marrying Daniel and I wanted that too. But Cary set out to take him away, set out with what seemed a planned campaign, deliberate, relentless, unscrupulous, and when a woman does this and she’s attractive she usually succeeds.

  The result was to make me get out altogether. It isn’t true that you can’t run away from things. Putting three thousand miles between you and the lost love and his new love does soften the blow, it does begin the process of driving the pain into the past. An American novelist had asked me to research the town of Cirencester in the nineteenth century. Anticipating an almost inevitable refusal, she wanted me to come over, spend some months with her, talk of my finds and of Victorian Gloucestershire, and help her with the American angle of the historical epic she was writing. She was astonished when I said yes.

  Therefore, I was in Massachusetts when Asta died.

  I knew, as well as anyone ever can know of a coming death, that she was going to die. I also knew how unhappy Swanny was, how lonely and increasingly despairing of her mother and her mother’s ways. It was all in the many letters Swanny wrote to me. She would have liked me to come home. Perhaps she had no idea how I felt, or even thought that because Daniel and I had never been married, things had not gone deep with me. Some women of her generation did think like this. But I was literally afraid to be in the same country, the same island, with Daniel and Cary. It wasn’t that I expected to bump into them but rather that wherever I was in the British Isles there would be a sense of proximity absent on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Swanny wrote to me that Asta had been taken into hospital with what the doctor said ‘wasn’t exactly a stroke, more a sort of spasm’. Maybe I should have offered to come home. I told myself cravenly that Asta was only my grandmother, that she was very very old, that she had other grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was Swanny who needed me, of course, not Asta. As it turned out it may have been the best thing in the world for Swanny that I didn’t come.

  The saddest letter was the one in which she wrote that she realized now she would never know. The question would never be answered. She had asked it for the last time a few days before Asta had her ‘spasm’, one evening when they were sitting together in the drawing room, the curtains were drawn and a gas fire burned in the neat brass grate. Asta had seemed more lucid, more like her old self, all that day.

  She lay on the sofa, which was drawn up in front of the fire, a piece of embroidery on the low table, Martin Chuzzlewit open and face downwards on the cushion beside her with her reading glasses resting on it. Her white hair, Swanny wrote, was blonde in the golden lamplight and if you looked at her through half-closed eyes you might have fancied it was a young woman reclining there. And Swanny (who was more fanciful and discursive in her letters than in life) asked me if I’d ever read that Poe story about the short-sighted young man who, too vain to wear glasses, courts and nearly marries the sprightly and bedizened old woman he has mistaken for a girl, but who is really his own great-great-grandmother. Swanny said she had never swallowed that before but she could now.

  She said to her mother, on an impulse and as if she had never asked it before, ‘Who am I, moder? Where did you get me from?’

  Asta looked at her, and Swanny said her expression was the most tender and loving she had ever seen on her face, and the most lacking in understanding. ‘You’re mine
, lille Swanny, all mine. Do you want me to tell you where mothers get babies from? Don’t you know?’

  As if she were very young. As if she were a child the teacher had forgotten to include in the sex-education class. Asta’s eyes closed and she fell asleep, as she always did now in the evenings when she laid her book down and took off her glasses.

  Swanny phoned to tell me Asta was dead. I didn’t offer to come home and when she was sure I wasn’t going to offer, she begged me not to come, it wasn’t necessary. Asta had been very old, ninety-three, and her death long expected. It was a shock, of course, but death is always that.

  A week later she wrote to me.

  Moder put in her will that she didn’t want a funeral. She’d once or twice told me this but I suppose I never believed her. Anyway, I thought you had to have a funeral, but evidently not. You can just tell the undertakers and ask for the person to be cremated, which is what I did with many misgivings but they weren’t all that surprised and didn’t seem to find it strange.

  Moder was an out-and-out atheist. She often told me she stopped believing in God when her little boy Mads died. That was the end of it and she never said a prayer again. I remember her saying loudly at one of our parties that she was a Nietzschean and believed God was dead. I don’t know where she picked that up but she knew a lot, she had educated herself extremely well. Anyway, it was right for her to get her wish about no funeral.

  In her will she left me everything she had, which wasn’t a great deal but more than I need. It was specifically left to me, ‘to my daughter, Swanhild Kjær’, and of course no questions were asked, I wasn’t even asked for my birth certificate. If I had been, so what? It gives Mor and Far as my parents and names me as Swanhild. But I felt strange about it, it brought up all those old feelings, and I even wondered if I should have said, no, I can’t take it, I’ve no right to it.