Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  Swanny had always had, as long as I had known her, a tiny red mark on her left cheekbone under the eye. It was a broken blood vessel, not a mole, but she began to turn it into one. I thought she had a dirty mark on her face and told her so but she only gave one of her mysterious smiles and next time I saw her the mark was bigger, a perfect circle about the size of a shirt button and put on with eyebrow pencil. It was always there after that, whether she was Swanny or the other one.

  One day she asked me to buy her some knitting wool and a pair of needles. Asta, of course, had been a fine needle-woman and my mother was good at sewing. There had been a phase when she made all my clothes and her own. But although Asta mentions buying wool to make baby clothes in the early part of the first diary, she must have stopped knitting when she became more prosperous and I’d never seen Swanny with any kind of needle in her hand.

  ‘I didn’t know you could knit,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve had to,’ she said in Mrs Elkins’ voice. ‘There was a time when I made everythink I wore—that is, in the woollies line.’

  ‘What colour would you like? And come to that what weight? It does come in weights, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Lilac or pink, a nice pastel shade. And it’d better be double-knit with the needles number eight. It’ll keep me busy when I’m watching the telly in the evenings. I’ve never cared to sit about idle.’

  ‘I’ll get you some pink or mauve wool this afternoon,’ I said, ‘so that you can make a start tonight.’

  Humour the mad and go along with everything they say, used to be advice given to those having to do with them. Yet advocating it is unnecessary, for this is our natural, or at any rate our easiest, response. It is the normal reaction. To challenge them, which is what Daniel used sometimes to do as a part of therapy, is such a frightening thing that we baulk at it and fall back on placebos and smiling acquiescence. Better humour the madwoman than face the unknown but potentially terrifying results of saying: ‘Why do you talk like that, act like that, dress like that? Who is this person you’ve become? Where is yourself?’

  I’d lived with a psychotherapist and knew his methods. I knew what he would advise, yet I did otherwise. I didn’t even ask her who she thought she was. She had become a working-class grandmother, knitting baby clothes, and I behaved as if this were entirely normal, just what I expected, and even pretended to admire the tangled mess she made as the pink wool was transformed into a cat’s-cradle of infinite complexity suspended from needles awkwardly gripped in her arthritic hands.

  There were, of course, the other days, the days when she was Swanny Kjær again. The knitting was put away—where, I wonder, and with what thoughts and resolutions?—the clothes were back to normal, her hair was brushed and her face discreetly painted, though the mole was painted on as well. Like this, speaking like a Hampstead lady, with a tweed suit on and stockings and high-heeled shoes, she took a taxi down to Covent Garden or Kensington to sign books in a bookshop or have lunch with her agent. Nor did Sandra have to cancel when the day came for her to go out live on Woman’s Hour.

  But the other one was taking over. The other one, the nameless unspecified separate persona, was slowly absorbing the Swanny I had known. The occasions when she was herself became fewer and fewer. I don’t mean to give the impression, when I say I and all of us humoured her, that we took no action. Her doctor had kept a watchful eye on Swanny from the start of all this. Since she went to him privately, in other words she paid him, he visited every week.

  ‘I could ask the psychiatrist to come to see her,’ he said to me. ‘That would mean explaining to her who and what he is and why he’s coming. In other words, it’s bringing out into the open that we think she’s mentally disturbed.’

  He too belonged to the humouring school, it seemed.

  ‘She seems happy enough,’ he said.

  I wasn’t sure of that but I was a coward too. I didn’t say to him that sometimes, when she was herself and when she was the other, I saw in her face a blank waste of despair.

  ‘At her age do we want to cause upheavals in her equilibrium? She’s a very old lady.’ I didn’t say that her mother, at Swanny’s age, had been walking for miles across Hampstead Heath, going to parties, selling her antique clothes, reading Dickens and writing her diary. What was the use? People are different. ‘It may be the best thing,’ he said, ‘for me to give her something to calm her down.’

  So Swanny went on the doctor’s tranquillizers, though she had never been anything but tranquil. If I had to find one single adjective that most exemplified her that’s what it would be. She was tranquil. She always had been and I suspect it was her reposefulness and quiescence, her gentle calm, which originally attracted Torben as much as her Norse goddess looks. To say that someone is tranquil doesn’t, after all, imply contentment, only perhaps a peaceful acceptance of or yielding to an unhappy fate.

  I have said I never asked her who she was when she wasn’t herself. As far as I know, no one asked her. The rest, Sandra and Mrs Elkins and the nurses, tended to shun her when the other took over from Swanny Kjær, that is they spoke to her when they had to, they performed their duties, but it was obvious they were growing afraid. They were simply afraid, as people are with the mad, of what she would do.

  Probably, they didn’t want to know who it was she became. All of us fear the manifestations of madness because its vagaries and its revelations show us what may lurk under the surface of our own minds. I was sometimes as frightened as they but I did want to know. I nearly asked. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask and I felt on these occasions much, I’m sure, as Swanny must have felt when she screwed herself up to ask Asta for the truth. But each time I drew back. And perhaps she would never have told me but have taken refuge in cunning and invented a name and an identity for the old knitting woman in the bedroom slippers.

  My understanding of who this woman was came to me six months after Swanny was dead. She was Edith Roper. Swanny thought she was Edith Roper.

  I re-read the Donald Mockridge coda Swanny had read. Edith had been born in May 1904. Edith was a blonde, blue-eyed child, tall for her age. She had a mole on her left cheek. By some twisted reasoning Swanny must have worked it out that if Edith hadn’t been adopted by Asta, if she had grown up in the milieu from which she had come, at eighty-one she would very probably have been like Mrs Elkins’ own mother, living in Walthamstow, many times a great-grandmother, a television-watching knitter and member of the local Senior Citizens’ club.

  So she became her. Because, perhaps, she or her unconscious thought it the proper thing, the right thing. Destiny had been cheated and it was for her to put things right. Or, believing herself to be Edith Roper, she wanted to be her, she had found an identity at last, and if it wasn’t the one she would have chosen, it was all she was going to get.

  Her imagination, the limited imagination of a sheltered woman whose contact with the working class had been as an employer of domestic help, made her place Edith among the unwashed. Her reaction to the occasional sight of the Heath Street bag woman was to put Edith’s bare feet into slippers and leave Edith’s hair uncombed. The sound of Mrs Elkins’ speech patterns her unconscious mimicked for Edith’s utterances.

  ‘Yet she was wrong,’ Paul said.

  ‘Oh, yes, she was wrong. Asta adopted a baby around the 28th of July, 1905. At that time Edith was fourteen months old and walking.’

  ‘And, as I remember it, she was writing about nursing the baby three months later. Besides, she could hardly have passed off an eighteen-month-old child, as Edith would then have been, as a new baby to Rasmus when he came home in November.’

  ‘How well you know the diary,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve just gone through it. I may not be such a wizard in a week’s time. Your aunt very obviously wanted to believe, she wanted an identity, and she latched on to the one that was a possibility. Perhaps it was the only possibility she could see. She may have found others in the past but none of them fitted as closely as thi
s did.’

  ‘It really isn’t possible, is it?’

  ‘That she was Edith? Not unless Asta falsified all the entries about her daughter Swanhild for the next three or four years, not unless she lied about what she said to Rasmus and he said to her, not unless she persuaded Rasmus to take on a child he would certainly have seen as the daughter of a murderer and a woman who was more or less a prostitute. I think we can discount all that. Besides, what are we saying? That Asta, who certainly did give birth on or around July 28th, was walking about the streets on that same day, ready to pick up and carry home someone else’s wandering infant?’

  ‘I wonder what happened. I mean, was her own child born dead? Or did it die soon after birth? Was it another boy or a girl at last? We’ll never know, will we?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘It’s going to be in those five missing pages from the first diary. Your aunt tore them out but she may not have thrown them away.’

  ‘You mean I should search the house?’

  ‘That depends on how much you want to know.’

  I said I supposed I did want to know. Yet if I did come to know I’d never be able to tell Swanny who was dead, who had died the victim of a gross delusion, believing herself to have been someone she could not by the wildest stretch of facts have ever been. Swanny hadn’t looked like the Westerbys, but plenty of people look different from the rest of their family members. Asta had told Swanny she was adopted but there had never been proof. They had all been born a century or many decades too soon for genetic fingerprinting.

  She was Asta’s own daughter and Asta had invented the story. Torben had been right all along. Asta had written and sent the anonymous letter herself. Hadn’t it been posted in Hampstead? Hadn’t she burnt it? Yes, in spite of her protestations of disgust, Asta wrote it.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe that,’ Paul said.

  ‘Why “afraid”?’

  ‘Just a figure of speech.’

  With that I had to be content but I wasn’t. Not altogether. He has such an open face, as those with Irish looks do have, eyes that are mirrors of the soul and a mobile mouth. His expression had become rather blank and fixed, a look that lifted gradually while I talked, wondering and speculating as one does when a complex revelation has been made, of Swanny’s references to her brother’s death at Argonne where Edith’s own brother had died and of Swanny’s insistence on adding that year to her age.

  It didn’t strike me particularly then that he didn’t want to talk any more about the anonymous letter. I supposed, quite wrongly as it happened, that he was growing bored with the whole subject and I changed it as soon as I could without obviousness.

  Nor did any searching of the house take place. Instead we went back to his house in Hackney which was so near to where Asta had once lived. He wanted to show it to me and nothing more was said that night about the diaries or Swanny’s strange misapprehension.

  21

  January 17th, 1920

  DET ER MÆRKELIGT, men sidste Gang Sergeanten kom paa Besøg, var det igen Hansines Frieftermiddag. Jeg kan sværge paa, at jeg ikke arrangerede det med Vilje, men det var bare helt tilfældigt.

  It’s strange but last time the Sergeant came to see me it was again Hansine’s afternoon off. I swear I didn’t arrange it that way, it just happened. Of course, I’m happier with her out of the way when he calls. I don’t want her flapping her apron and saying how handsome he is or even making snide remarks, and now she’s left there’s no risk of that.

  She has gone to stay with Cropper’s mother and father until the wedding next month. I don’t envy her, I must say. Unless she’s been exaggerating, old Mrs Cropper never misses a chance to cast up to her the fact that she’s a foreigner, criticizes her English and has found out she’s a whole six months older than Cropper. An awful crime, this one. What bosh it all is!

  Poor Hansine’s biggest dread is that her future mother-in-law will find out she can’t read and write. I don’t know how she thinks she’s going to keep that dark.

  April 12th, 1920

  Hansine is married. Rasmus and I were invited to the wedding but of course we didn’t go. I gave the happy couple a Royal Copenhagen vase which I’ve had for years, given me originally by Onkel Holger’s sister for my own wedding. I never liked it and it’s been shut up in a cupboard for years, so closely hidden away that I was sure Hansine had never seen it before. However, from the look she gave me when I presented it to her, I’m not so sure. I hope she won’t drop it like she has so many of my nicest pieces.

  The new maid who takes over from her is called Elsie. Emily and Elsie, how confusing! Mrs Cropper as she now is will be living with her husband in Leytonstone. One of these fine days, if I’m invited, I shall get the Sergeant to drive me over to her house. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps not. I’ll have more interesting places to go to.

  Who would have thought Rasmus would agree to the Sergeant driving me about? (I must make a note here to remember to call him Harry.) The fact is I was sure he would fly into one of his rages, as he does more and more these days. I imagined him saying, ‘If my wife goes out in my motor I am going to drive her.’ But all he said was that in that case it would have to be the Mercedes, which I know is the motor he’s least fond of.

  Harry was very pleased. He said he’d take me out every Saturday if I liked and in the evenings in the week when his work is done. His job is with the Metropolitan Water Board, though he started life as a coachman. We’d best stick to Saturdays for the time being, I said. What about your wife and your daughters? Won’t they want you to be with them? He only smiled and said he’d never neglect his family, he knew better than that, and we went out for our first drive, up into Hertfordshire to see the country and some pretty villages.

  I felt rather strange and awkward for a while. I thought he would take advantage, I’d been brought up to believe people of his class do take advantage if you let yourself relax with them, but he didn’t. He is always perfectly respectful. I had brought a picnic with me. We found a lovely place under some trees down a quiet country lane. Harry brought the picnic basket out to me and spread the cloth on the grass, he laid a blanket down for me and put the cushions just so, but I could see he wasn’t going to sit down with me and share it, he was going off for a walk.

  Of course I wasn’t going to have that. I made him sit down opposite me and though he was awkward at first he soon got over that. It was a strange feeling, the sense I had that at last, at my advanced age, I’d found someone I could talk to. I felt I had to grasp at it before it flew away and my chance of it was gone for ever.

  He asked me about Denmark and how it had felt to be an exile and then I saw that the trees above us were beech trees. There came to me then such a yearning for my home and my country that it was like a sharp pain in my heart. I believe he could tell but instead of changing the subject he got me talking on and on about Denmark and this free talking and remembering helped me so that I felt stronger and I could laugh again.

  He knows a lot. I was going to write ‘for a working man’ but that wouldn’t be right. He knows a lot for any man. A lot of history, for one thing. He told me which members of the English royal family had married Danish princesses, for instance. It wasn’t possible for me to confirm this but I looked it up in an encyclopedia when I got home and he was right. Then he is very knowledgeable about the countryside and talked about an English painter I’d never heard of, not knowing the English had any painters. This one was called John Constable who painted woods and fields in Suffolk and Essex but lived in Hampstead and is buried in the churchyard there. I said we might go there and look at his grave.

  Next week we are going to take the children with us. Harry is very fond of Swanny, is always saying how lovely and charming she is. In one way I like this, I love to see Swanny admired as she deserves, but in another it makes me uncomfortable. I think I’m a bit jealous—jealous of my own daughter!

  July 29th, 1920

  Yesterday Swanny
was fifteen. She didn’t want a party, she says none of the girls at school is close enough to her for her to want to invite friends to her home. She has no real friends. Like me, she doesn’t make friends easily. Parents are always saying of their child, ‘Where does so-and-so get that from? Not from me or her father. There’s none of that in our family,’ as if everything about you must be inherited. I don’t think it happens quite like that, I think children copy their parents and behave the way they’ve seen them behave, though it’s not a view that’s fashionable.

  Swanny said she might have felt differently about having a party if Mogens had been alive, if Mogens could have been there. I might have said to her that he’d be twenty-two if he’d lived and probably not even living at home with us, but I didn’t. I said that though we’d always be sad about Mogens dying, life had to go on and we’d have to learn to remember him without being unhappy. It didn’t have much effect. I don’t want her young life spoiled by mooning and brooding on a dead brother.

  I am reading Bleak House for the third time.

  September 4th, 1920

  We are off to Denmark, Rasmus and I. It’s strange, I’ve been on holiday to Paris and to Vienna but I’ve never been back to my own country and I’m very excited. We’ll have to spend a day or two with his horrible sister in Aarhus but the rest of the time will be with Ejnar and Benedicte in Copenhagen. From what I’ve seen of her, which isn’t much, just when they stayed a night with us two years ago, I rather like Benedicte. On the face of it, she didn’t seem bitter and mean-spirited and prudish and cold and snobbish and high-and-mighty like the rest of them. The Danes are supposed to be merry folk, drinking beer and laughing and having a jolly time, but I can’t say I’ve seen much sign of it.