Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Imagine, he hadn’t it with him. He never wears it. I asked him if he’d known Mogens before the battle.

  ‘Moans?’ he said.

  I suppose that was the first time I realized how absurd the name must sound to English ears. ‘Jack,’ I said. ‘Everyone called him Jack but his mother,’ and I explained about names in our family and the language differences and how hard it is to adjust when you come to a new country. He listened as if he really cared, I’m not used to men like that, most of them never listen to what women say. It was distracting us from the real business of the afternoon, all this conversation about names, and I had to bring it back.

  I said, ‘Did you know him at all? I’d like to know how he was beforehand.’

  ‘Quite cheerful,’ he said. ‘He was a brave boy,’ and then he went on to say they’d known each other well and talked together a lot. It was finding out they lived so near each other in London that gave them a sort of bond. Mogens told him he’d lived in Hackney, and said precisely where, when we first came to this country in a hundred and five and the Sergeant said that was a coincidence too because he knew the district well and had had friends nearby at the same time.

  I asked him to tell me about that day, July the 1st on the Somme, and he said, how much did I know? Colonel Perry wrote to me, I said, and told me Mogens had died instantly, not that I believed it.

  ‘I’d like you to tell me the truth about what happened that night.’

  ‘War’s not the way the people at home believed it was,’ he said. ‘If they knew there’d never be any more wars. It wouldn’t suit the politicians to let them know.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I said.

  He’d been looking at me with those granite eyes but he turned them away. It was as if he were saying, I can face you when we talk of polite fictions but it’s not fitting for our eyes to meet when I tell you these truths. He said he went out into no man’s land to look for a young officer, a Second Lieutenant called Quigley, whose soldier servant while searching for him had been killed by stepping on a live grenade. But before he found Quigley he came upon one wounded man after another and each time he managed to bring them in. All this he told with absolute modesty and self-effacement, speaking of it as lightly as another man might of retrieving dead birds after a shoot.

  Quigley, when he came upon him at dawn, was dead right up by the German wire, so he left him there and returned in full view of the enemy.

  ‘They never fired on me,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why not. Perhaps they couldn’t believe their eyes. I was looking at them and that’s why I nearly stumbled over Jack. I gave him a drink from my water bottle and then I picked him up in my arms but that was too much for them and they started firing on me and got me in the arm. It was another fellow a lot braver than me dragged us both in on a groundsheet.’

  I would have given ten years of my life to have been able not to ask. But bargains like that can’t be made. Either you’re the sort of person who can hide from things or else you’re not. I’d rather be so unhappy I want to die, and see the facts and look them in the face, than delude myself. What Rasmus wants is his business, he can deceive himself if he chooses, I won’t even judge, but I’m responsible for what I am and what I do.

  I asked, feeling so sick I could taste the tea I swallowed come up in my throat mixed up with bile, ‘Mogens was alive then, he was still alive.’

  He said, ‘I could tell you what Colonel Perry told you.’

  ‘You tell me the truth.’

  So he did. I can’t write it. I wanted to know and I got what I thought I wanted. Better get on quickly and not write that part. Mogens died two days later in the hospital on the Quai d’Escale in Le Havre.

  The Sergeant expected me to cry. I didn’t. I don’t. I was thinking, this man tried to save my son’s life. Why? He wasn’t a relative, he hadn’t even known him long, yet he risked his own life to save Mogens. I will never understand people.

  ‘Will you come again?’ I said. ‘When we could talk about it together?’

  He said he would. I didn’t really want to talk about it again, not ever again, but I want to talk to him. Am I mad? When he left I gave him my hand. He took it and brought it to his lips. No man has ever kissed my hand before.

  18

  SWANNY WIPED THEIR COVERS with a damp cloth, stacked them in sets of ten, weighed these down with telephone directories and kept them in a warm place. Whether this is suitable treatment for old books that the damp has got to I don’t know but it seemed to work fairly well. By the time I got to them, when I went straight to Swanny on my return from America, she had read all the diaries, made a tentative translation of the early ones and had some inkling of their value.

  I remember looking at those which she put into my hands as at objects rather than books. They smelt of mildew, in spite of being dried out. Their covers were spotted like a mosaic with ineradicable mould marks, a soft pinkish-grey marbling. Asta’s writing was clear enough if you read Danish and didn’t find her apparent dislike of starting new paragraphs an obstacle to decipherment. I picked up no more than a word here and there. Now I no longer remember which years I looked at, though I saw no stubs of torn-out pages. In any case, the first notebook wasn’t among them.

  ‘They were in the coach house,’ Swanny said, ‘on the shelves beside Torben’s National Geographic. I can see exactly what happened. It was that day when the gardener told me she tried to burn some books but his fire had gone out. She wouldn’t have wanted to take them all the way upstairs again, so she put them on the shelves down there and forgot about them.’

  The copy in my hands looked so uninviting I wondered why Swanny had read them.

  She looked a little shamefaced. ‘I caught sight of my own name.’

  ‘And you had to see what she said about you?’

  ‘I started reading, Ann, and I got caught up in it. It was like reading a novel. And not just like that, it was like reading the novel you’ve always wanted to read but have never been able to find. Does that make sense?’

  It made more sense, though I didn’t say so, that, having seen her name, Swanny wanted to find out if her own origins were mentioned in this early diary. I could imagine a sick excitement possessing her as she saw that date, July 1905. She blushed. Perhaps I was looking at her too penetratingly.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I ought to read them. I said to myself, if Mor intended to burn them it must have been because she didn’t want anyone else to read them. But that’s not certain, is it? There could be other motives. I’m sure there were other motives. In the first pages she says she doesn’t want Far to read them. Hansine couldn’t read. Jack and Ken and I used to be very tactful about that. But Mor says very little about not wanting people to know what she was writing, only that Danish is like a code. I thought, suppose she meant to burn them because she thought people might laugh at her? Suppose she thought they’d be found after she was dead and people—I mean, you and me, I suppose—would just find them ridiculous.’

  It didn’t sound like Mormor, who had never much cared what anyone thought of her. A more likely reason for an intention to destroy the diaries seemed that she simply had no more use for them, they were finished, done with, actually as well as metaphorically a closed book. She had always hated clutter. Acquisitiveness bored her and so did sentimentality. She kept her diaries because she was a natural writer, she set down her days’ events for the reason I suppose most diarists do, for therapy, for the unburdening of the soul. Every day such writers are on the analyst’s couch. They are indifferent to the verdict of posterity.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Swanny said, mightily relieved. She had to justify her behaviour, she had to excuse what might be an intrusion into her dead mother’s privacy. ‘That would have been just like her. You remember how she used to get rid of her clothes. When she moved here she sold nearly all her furniture, though God knows we had room for it. She just dumped the diaries because they cluttered the place up. She can’t have dreamed of
possible future publication.’

  ‘Publication?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, Ann, why not?’

  ‘All sorts of reasons. It’s not easy to get things published.’

  ‘Oh, I meant privately. I’m quite well-off, you know. I could afford it.’ She looked at me wistfully. ‘A few hundred copies, say?’

  I began to tell her how expensive it would be, how publishing a book doesn’t just mean printing it and putting a jacket on finished copies but sales, distribution, publicity, promotion, advertising. She interrupted me, she hadn’t been listening.

  ‘I’ve found a real translator. It was really rather clever of me. I went to the High Hill Bookshop and looked at all the novels they had until I found one translated from the Danish. They only had one. The translator was a woman called Margrethe Cooper and I guessed she must be a Dane married to an Englishman which in fact turned out to be the case. I wrote to her care of the publishers and asked her to translate the first diary for me and she said she would and she’s doing it now. That’s why the first one’s not there, the one that starts before I was born.’

  Not a word about revelations. She was looking limpidly at me, her face open and frank, the way in fact the Westerby women did look when they had most to hide. There was no anxiety in her face, no stress. She looked happier than she had before I went away. She looked younger. It was then that I understood I shouldn’t discourage her in this apparently extravagant venture. It was doing her good, it was giving her an interest. Perhaps too she thought it would give her the answer.

  I stayed with her for two weeks. Whatever clearing out she had done, by then everything was back in place. When I asked her if she had thought any more about selling the house she looked at me incredulously. She seemed almost affronted and I realized that the idea had passed from her mind as if it had never been. She talked a lot about Asta, said she still fancied she heard her footstep on the stair and heard her voice saying, ‘Do I smell the good coffee?’ I was invited to put my face inside a drawer in her room and experience the Asta scent. But not a word did she say about her own origins or that quest to know which at one time had been an obsession.

  If it cost a lot to publish the diaries, she said one day, it would be the money Asta herself left that she’d be spending. But she smiled as if entirely comforted and no more was said about doubting if she had a right to inherit from her mother.

  I went home to the place I had then in West Hampstead, bracing myself to face up to ghosts of Daniel’s presence. Resolving to sell it and move, to do what Swanny had decided not to do, helped to exorcise them. I could tell myself, I shan’t be here long, I don’t have to get used to it.

  I didn’t buy the flat in Camden Town only because there was room in it for the doll’s house, but it was a selling point the vendors can’t have foreseen. When the time came it took up the whole of that room. Now that Asta was dead and, because of the diaries, the sheer bulk of them, had taken on a further dimension and become a woman with a secret life, the things she had made for the doll’s house also grew more interesting. Up till then they had just been miniature curtains and tiny cushions and tablecloths sewn with small exquisite stitches; now they were invested with her life. As I took them from the rooms and put them in the boxes and bags for removal they looked and felt different, for they were the work of a woman who between the times she sewed them was engaged in a totally disparate task, the committing of her daily life to innumerable pages.

  It made her not quite the Asta, the Mormor, I’d known, no longer the doll’s-house-maker’s wife, but someone quite other, someone apart. It was rather as if I had come upon her in a room in Swanny’s house, sitting with her back to me, reading her Dickens perhaps, and when she turned round it was another woman’s face that she showed me. I asked myself what or whose that face might be but came up with no answers.

  Paul Sellway was due to come to Willow Road at 6.30. I got to the house much earlier, worried in case it wasn’t warm or Mrs Elkins hadn’t been in to clean it. But as soon as I stepped into the hall and began putting lights on, I saw that it was perfect, it was as it always had been, a serene and lovely place, the temperature that of a fine summer’s day, smelling fresh but, as all houses should be, smelling of nothing. It gleamed as it had always done and everywhere were edges, surfaces, strands and facets of captured light.

  On the hall table the Chelsea clock had stopped. No doubt, Swanny had wound it every evening. Now the gilt hands (two of those gleaming objects) on the small round face stood still at ten past twelve. As a child I had loved this clock for the two porcelain people who adorned it, sitting on top of a bank of porcelain flowers, the turbaned sultan in his yellow coat and his odalisque who lifts her veil for him alone. The last Bing and Grøndahl Christmas wall-plate was dated 1987. The first one, with two crows sitting on a branch, looking at the prospect of a city, had juleaften 1899 round its border.

  There would be a new one coming in time for Christmas. I went to the study, deciding to take Paul Sellway in there, and turned up the radiator, though it was as warm as the summery hall.

  It occurred to me then that the diaries should be here, not upstairs, and I determined to bring them down before he arrived. They were heavier than I expected and there were more of them than I remembered, or rather I had forgotten how weighty each one of the sixty-three was. Four trips up and down stairs were needed to move the lot. When I’d finished I wondered where to put them. There was no vacant drawer in the desk, no empty bookshelf. Besides, I felt they should be put away somewhere, out of sight, out of dust. Probably, considering their past and potential value, they should be on safe deposit in a bank. But who would steal them? What use would they be to anyone who did?

  Swanny had taken over the study, not when Torben died, she would have had no use for it then, but as soon as she began to translate the diaries. His desk became hers. Feeling quite daring, she told me, she bought a typewriter and set about teaching herself to type with three fingers, which after all is often the best and fastest way. Once she could handle the typewriter, translating became fun. She found herself sitting down every morning sharp at ten with Asta’s diary beside her, rendering it into English on the Olivetti.

  I sat down at the desk, trying to put myself into Swanny’s shoes, turning the pages of the first diary and coming, inevitably, to the revelation. Or had she? Or was that discovery made before she bought the typewriter and while she was painstakingly writing it all down by hand? It must have been early on, that was certain, before I came back from America. She had sat here and it had burst upon her, the solution she had been seeking for ten years, or else it wasn’t like that at all, it was an anticlimax, a disappointment or a relief. It struck me then that she might have found out it was as Torben had always said; Asta was senile, Asta was wandering or hoaxing, she had made it up. On the page for July 28th (or the 29th or 30th or sometime about then) she read that she was indeed Asta’s own daughter, born of her own body, delivered on July 28th in Lavender Grove, Asta’s own child by her husband Rasmus.

  But in that case why had she torn out the five pages?

  I looked up at the bookshelves that faced me, wondering if I could put the paperbacks that were on them elsewhere and use the resulting space for the diaries, when I noticed among them the green spine that denotes Penguin crime. There was only one. I sensed before I took it down what it would be.

  This copy was in better condition than the one Cary had given me. The corners weren’t dog-eared and a faint gloss still remained on the faces, shadowy or clear, that composed the collage: Madeleine Smith, Hawley Harvey Crippen, Oscar Slater, Dr Lamson, Buck Ruxton and Alfred Eighteen Roper. Swanny and Torben always wrote their names and the date on the flyleaf of every book they owned. It’s an old-fashioned habit and no one seems to do it any more. I looked inside the Penguin with the green spine and there on the top of the title page Asta had written: A. B. Westerby, July 1966.

  The only crime books Swanny had were two Agatha Christies in
paperback and The House of the Arrow by A. E. W. Mason. Or, rather, the only ones Torben had had, for it was his name written inside them. So Swanny must have found this copy among Asta’s things, glanced through it and, finding Navarino Road mentioned and the name of Roper, begun to read. This was a name she had previously read in Asta’s diary. Soon she came upon the missing Edith.

  And yet I was sure the name Roper occurred only once in the diary. I’d read that first volume of diaries three times, once the translation in manuscript, once the proof, then the finished copy, yet when Cary had mentioned the name it had meant nothing. Then it came to me. The passages which alerted Swanny must have been in the missing pages. Cary was right. Somewhere in there Swanny had found a great deal more about Alfred and Lizzie Roper, an account of some aspect of their lives written by her mother in August 1905, and it had to be something pertinent to her.

  I was looking through the green paperback, hoping to find in the piece on Roper a page turned down or better still a pencil marking or even an underlining, when the doorbell rang. Paul Sellway. I expected a big fair man, a man with one of those smooth Danish faces, mild blue eyes and the long upper lip that also seems characteristic. Although I’d never seen Hansine I’d seen photographs, notably the one in which she wears an apron and frilly cap, and Swanny had told me Joan Sellway was a tall blonde woman. I expected him to look like my impressions, mostly imaginary, of Hansine and her daughter.

  He was thin and dark. If I’d been asked to identify his nationality I’d have said he was Irish. He had the Irishman’s upturned mouth and wild eye and sharp jaw and copious black curly hair.

  ‘I’m a bit early,’ he said. ‘I’ve been getting excited about the prospect of seeing the diaries.’

  Even so, it seemed a bit brusque to take him straight into the study. ‘Come and have a drink,’ I said.

  For the first time in my life I was experiencing the pleasure of being proud of my own house. For it was my home, something that hadn’t quite sunk in when I brought Cary there, or perhaps I’d been distracted by the variety of emotions the sight of her aroused. When Paul Sellway followed me into the drawing room I felt a small childish unexpected glow of pride. The only colour in Swanny’s house was in the ornaments and the pictures. Otherwise all was pallor or darkness with everywhere the glint of gold and the shine of silver. I saw him look at the Larsson, move closer to study it.