Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  There has been no shortage of claimants. Over the years, their appearance triggered off by particular significant events, a sequence of children, young women and later on older women have presented themselves as Edith Roper.

  Edith’s brother Edward, dying at Argonne during the last weeks of the First World War, was the subject of a sentimental piece in a Cambridge newspaper, which at the same time resurrected the whole Roper case, the murder of Lizzie Roper, the death of Maria Hyde, Roper’s acquittal and Edith’s disappearance. Among the results of this article was the arrival at Cambridge Police Station of a Mrs Catchpole from King’s Lynn with a girl in her early teens she declared to be Edith and whom she said she had brought up as her own, having bought her from a commercial traveller for £27 2s.6d. in September 1905. Mrs Catchpole was later discovered to have spent the previous two years in a private lunatic asylum. The girl was undisputedly her own daughter.

  At the same time a girl aged about fifteen was at Hackney Police Station declaring herself to be Edith. She was in service with a family in Hampstead and went by the name of Margaret Smith. Alfred Roper was asked if he would see her with a view to making an identification but this he refused to do, just as he refused to see all the other claimants.

  He told a journalist, ‘I have no interest in her. She was not my child.’

  Now a couple of national newspapers took the opportunity to revive the whole Roper affair, there were articles by people prepared to swear that they had been at school with Edith or their children had, photographs of young girls said to be Edith and letters from would-be Ediths with all kinds of surnames and from places as distant as Edinburgh, Penzance and Belfast.

  It died down at last. Margaret Smith was reported as saying she had tried it on because someone had told her a legacy of a hundred pounds would be Edith’s and was at present awaiting its rightful possessor in a Lombard Street bank. No more was heard from other claimants until a novel was published in 1922, purportedly based on the Roper case. This was For Pity’s Sake by Venetia Adams, in which the child heroine, whose name is Pity, sees her mother murdered by a jealous lover, herself escapes death and is brought up by an eccentric painter who finds her wandering in Tite Street, Chelsea, near his studio.

  The publication of this book, though it was far from becoming a bestseller, fetched forth another crop of aspiring Ediths. This time, as was appropriate, they were older. All claimed to be the true age Edith would have been, eighteen. None was able to furnish a shred of proof of identity or even establish a likelihood of identity. One was a mulatto.

  Two more presented themselves when Alfred Roper died in Fen Ditton in 1925. Money, again, seems to have been the motive. Roper died intestate and the few hundreds he possessed had been divided between his brothers and sisters. Neither claimant was able to produce any evidence of identity, one being seven or eight years older than Edith Roper would have been. The other had natural parents, both alive and anxious to deny their daughter’s claim.

  After that, with interest in Roper fast dying, no more claimants appeared for many years. During the 1940s a woman called Edith Robinson wrote an article for the News of the World in which she claimed to have been kidnapped from Navarino Road in July 1905 by a man called Robinson and brought up by him and his common-law wife in Middlesbrough for the express purpose of becoming their son’s bride. She had been married to Harold Robinson for fifteen years, she said, and they had four sons. The article appeared as one in a series by people who had gone missing as children. Two weeks later Mrs Robinson retracted and declared the whole thing to have been a hoax.

  She was the last of them. No more Edith Ropers appeared and it is unlikely there will be more. The possibility exists, of course, that when the present writer’s account of Roper’s trial appears in book form, more claimants will assert their rights. But the odds are overwhelmingly against their being that lost child who was last seen ascending a staircase in search of her mother.

  On that summer’s day fifty-two years ago, Edith Roper vanished for ever.

  Donald Mockridge

  Moreton-in-Marsh

  1957

  17

  November 11th, 1918

  HER I MORGENAVISEN var der nyt om, at Kejseren var stukket af til Holland. Det hedder sig, at da han blev født, blev hans Skulder flaaet i Stykker af Lægerne, da de forsøgte at hale ham i Land fra Kejserinde Frederick. I den senere Tid har jeg undret mig over, om det var Aarsagen til hans Ondskab, om det var det, der gjorde, at han hadede Kvinder, fordi han gav sin Moder og Mænd Skylden for, at de havde beskadiget ham.

  In this morning’s newspaper was the news that the Kaiser has run away to Holland. The story goes that when he was born the doctors tore his shoulder to pieces trying to pull him out of the Empress Frederick. Lately I’ve wondered if all his wickedness stemmed from that, if it made him hate women because he blamed his mother, and men because they injured him.

  Mogens’ arm was a bit twisted when he was born but I had a good doctor in Stockholm who taught me to exercise the arm every day. It got all right. At any rate, they found nothing wrong when they examined him to see if he was fit to fire a rifle! I’ve been thinking a lot about Mogens again, mostly about when he was little, my firstborn, a nice, good boy, very different from his brother. I could never think of him as Jack, though he became completely English. Yesterday I re-read the letter I had from his commanding officer, telling me how brave Rifleman ‘Jack’ Westerby was and, more to the point when it’s a mother reading it, how he died without pain.

  You can bear your children dying. What is unbearable is to think of them suffering, to think of that particular person, the child you carried, bleeding and in agony. I did think of that a lot before Colonel Perry’s letter came and even now I have doubts, I ask myself, can it be true? Can it be possible that one moment Mogens was alive and well and brave, perhaps pointing his gun at the enemy or charging at their lines, and the next moment that he fell asleep? Being me, I’d like to know the truth. Writing about it helps me, writing about things always helps and I suppose that’s why I do it.

  Knud will be all right now. I’m sure of that, though I haven’t the least idea where he is. Rasmus claims to know this because in the letter, which came yesterday, Knud put in a code word. He wrote, apropos this ridiculous doll’s house, ‘I wonder if you got the Venetian glass you wanted for Marie’s windows?’ If Rasmus is right that means the Italian Front where everything came to an end when the Austrians got their Armistice last week. But Rasmus wasn’t right last time when he thought Knud was in Palestine because he wrote something about a friend being a Good Samaritan. We shall see.

  The Allies are meeting in a railway carriage somewhere in France to present their Armistice terms. Why a railway carriage, I wonder. If I wanted to meet an enemy and discuss putting an end to a war I’d do it in a really grand hotel with French cooking and plenty of champagne (of which there is lots in Paris), especially if someone else was paying, as no doubt they are. It appears that I say this because I am only a woman and know no better, as my dear husband told me when I suggested the idea in a cosy marital conversation.

  He works on the doll’s house all the evening and now it’s too cold to be outside in his workshop he has brought it into my dining room. Laboriously, before he goes to bed he lugs it all out again so that Marie doesn’t see it when she gets up in the morning. Joking apart (I’ve written this expression in English because I like it so much, ‘joking apart’) I think working on the doll’s house saved his sanity after Mogens was killed. I haven’t written about this before, I don’t know why not. One day I went out to the workshop for something and there he was with the plane in his hand, working away at smoothing a piece of wood, and the tears were pouring down his cheeks.

  I didn’t let him see me but went quietly away. It’s different for me, I didn’t cry when we first heard and I haven’t cried since. I don’t.

  February 10th, 1919

  When we gave Marie the doll’s house this morning she cou
ldn’t speak, she was stunned, she went pale and I thought she was going to cry. She was afraid to touch it but after a while she stuck out one finger and gave it a little poke, pulling away as if she’d burnt herself.

  She turned away and threw herself into my arms. Rasmus was mortified, really hurt. He couldn’t stop himself, I felt quite sorry for him.

  ‘What about me? Don’t I get a kiss? Who made the thing, I should like to know?’

  He doesn’t understand she’s only a baby—she was eight today—and that it was all too much for her, such a grand palace, more an idealization than a copy of this house. I’m used to it and besides I’ve always thought the idea silly, so I suppose I can’t see any longer how wonderful the finished work is.

  Marie soon recovered. She’s not sensitive like Swanny. Five minutes later and she was hugging Rasmus, kissing him, opening all the doors, fetching cushions and pictures out, putting them back all wrong and shouting for Swanny to come and see. Swanny of course had seen already and may well have been wondering—I would have—why Far hadn’t made one for her.

  She was sweetness itself to Marie. Not a sign of envy or resentment. She has dressed two tiny dolls for her sister, for a birthday present. They are a bit big for the house but they just fit in, and are supposed to represent Mor and Far, me in a splendid copy of my gas-blue mousseline dress and Rasmus in a black suit and with a very lifelike brown beard.

  There was no envy but I hate to see her so sad. Mogens’ dying has made her sad like a grown-up, grave and quiet and with such a look of suffering on her sweet face. I’ve asked Rasmus to be especially kind to her—well, just kind, for a change—but all he says is, what about him? Who is there to pity him for losing his son? And then he says, what do children know about pain?

  May 9th, 1919

  We dined last evening with Mr and Mrs Housman. Her brother’s widow was there too, though no longer a widow, having married again before her husband was cold in his grave (as Mrs Housman puts it, though not in her hearing). He and she are called Mr and Mrs Cline, which of course comes from the German Klein. His great-grandfather was a German who came here a hundred years ago but people still shouted after him in the street when the war was on. They broke his windows and someone wrote on his house in red paint: ‘The blood of British Tommies is on your head.’

  The funny thing is that he was hotter against the Germans than anyone else there last night. He kept saying we had to crush and destroy Germany so that what happened could never happen again. Then everyone started talking about what’s going on in Versailles and Mr Cline said Germany should lose all her possessions overseas, have her army taken away and the Kaiser should be caught and executed. Mrs Cline clapped her hands and cheered—she’d had too much to drink—and said she’d laughed out loud when she heard the Germans were protesting about the conditions of the treaty.

  I wore my new Quaker-style dress of oyster-white charmeuse and old-rose crêpe de Chine. It’s the shortest I’ve ever worn, showing a lot of leg. Well, I’m not forty yet!

  August 3rd, 1919

  I see I haven’t yet noted in this diary the return of Cropper. He has been back two months now and is as handsome as ever, no doubt the result of spending the war as a prisoner instead of in the trenches.

  Supposedly, he was never allowed near any of those fräuleins or mademoiselles. Anyway, he seems to have kept the faith with Hansine and they have named the day. ‘Why next February?’ I said. ‘Why not tomorrow? You’re not getting any younger.’

  She’s a few months older than me, so she’ll be forty before the wedding.

  ‘You don’t have to be young to get married,’ she said.

  ‘That depends on what you want out of it,’ I said.

  She took my meaning. ‘I don’t want children.’

  That made me laugh. As if wanting has anything much to do with it. She doesn’t know much if she thinks it all stops at forty. But she did give me a surprise when she said,

  ‘I’ve had enough of children.’

  She no longer bothers to show me any respect. She’s barely polite to Rasmus, whom she used to fear so much. I suppose she thinks she has nothing to be afraid of any more. Cropper is back on the railway, earning a good wage, and seems even keener to marry her than she is to marry him. I shall never understand people.

  October 1st, 1919

  I’ve just read, for the third time, a letter which has come from the man who carried Mogens out of no man’s land. It was July 1st, 1916, and he was the sergeant who went looking for one of his officers and, before he found this man’s body, carried five wounded men to the comparative safety of the British lines. One of them was Mogens. Sergeant E. H. Duke got the VC for what he did. Most VCs didn’t survive, so he was lucky.

  The Sergeant, which is how I’ve begun thinking of him, has invited himself here to tell me about Mogens. That’s what the letter is about. His address is Leyton, not too far from here. Of course I can’t really judge with English, but it seems a very good, well-written letter for someone who is, after all, a common working man. A far cry, for instance, from the letters the love-lorn Cropper used to send Hansine.

  When I showed it to him Rasmus said, ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘It would have been another thing if he’d saved Jack’s life.’

  I said he’d done his best but Rasmus, with typical lack of logic or even common sense, just said, ‘His best wasn’t good enough.’

  Once, when I was young, I’d have written back at once and told the Sergeant to come but I’m not young any more and have learned the value of sleeping on things. Sleep on it and see how you feel in the morning, is what I tell myself. If need be, he can wait a week, it won’t hurt him.

  November 15th, 1919

  I wonder if I’m so bitter towards Hansine because she is going to have a love affair and I have never had one.

  It took some effort to write that. Being honest isn’t easy and it’s just as hard on paper. When it’s written down it’s not over like some remark you make may be. You can re-read it and feel the sting again.

  Marriage can be a love affair, the only kind indeed respectable women are allowed. Once I thought mine would be but it never was, it was only a swift disillusionment and a long slow winding down.

  It’s strange really, writing in Danish, knowing as I write this language which is closer to me than any other, is my language, the first I ever uttered—I still read my Dickens in Danish—that it is as secret as the writing Mogens used to do when he was a child. He and Knud found that if you dipped a pen in lemon juice and wrote something the words would be invisible until you heated the paper. Mine is more secret than that in a way because no matter how much the English held my diary in front of the fire they would never be able to read the words.

  So I feel I can write without risk that sometimes when I look at a man like Cropper or at Mr Cline (who at least is a gentleman), handsome men, I feel a curious longing I can’t—or daren’t—define. I think to myself, if I lived in another world or at another time or in a dream, I might have you or you for my lover. But in this world I never can and never would.

  Poor little Swanny has the German measles. When Rasmus heard he said he thought the war was over but apparently they’d started a counter-attack.

  November 30th, 1919

  Sergeant Duke came to see me today.

  I expected him in time for tea but he was early. Swanny is still away from school with the German measles, so she answered the door when the bell rang. It was Hansine’s afternoon off. I was upstairs, getting dressed. Although I haven’t worn mourning for Mogens, I put on my black crêpe de Chine with the satin bands, it seemed more suitable and dignified. But then I asked myself what I was doing, making a false image of myself for this man, this ordinary working man who happened to be braver than most men. So I got back into my navy skirt and crocheted blouse. The only ornament I had was that butterfly brooch.

  He is even better-looking than Crop
per. Fair-haired, tall, a truly military figure. Why on earth had I expected him to be in uniform? The war is over. He was wearing a dark suit with a very high stiff collar and black tie. My first thought—it would be—was that I should have kept the black dress on.

  I walked towards him and held out my hand. He took it in both his and that, for some reason, amazed me. I don’t usually notice the colour of people’s eyes, I can have known them for years and not be able to say what colour their eyes are, but I saw his. They’re not likely to be as highly coloured as mine! The colour of his registered with me before I even spoke. They are grey, not a uniform grey but full of tiny gleaming sparks, like granite.

  He called me ‘madam’. He said, ‘Madam, it’s very good of you to ask me here,’ and then, ‘This dear young lady and I have been talking about her brother.’

  I sent Swanny away. I had this premonition I’d be hearing things she shouldn’t hear. He wouldn’t sit down until I asked him to, he was very respectful, yet at the same time I felt this wasn’t a man with the soul of a servant. He belongs to himself, he’s no one else’s, just as I belong to myself.

  Emily brought the tea things but I made the tea myself, using the brass spirit kettle. I usually only do this for special guests. He said I must excuse him for staring, he had expected an older lady, and he called me ‘madam’ again.

  ‘You must say “Mrs Westerby”,’ I said. ‘You’ve made yourself an important man, you have the highest honour any man can have. Will you show me your Victoria Cross?’