Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  The question was whether, when the Roper film came to be made, the indoor scenes should be shot inside Devon Villa, Navarino Road, itself or in some other house chosen for the purpose. Devon Villa is still standing, as I’d been told Asta’s house in Lavender Grove still stands, though I’d never seen it. The obvious and best thing surely, as I said to Cary, would be to use the real house and consider it a piece of luck it hadn’t been demolished. Ah, she said, you say that because you don’t know television production companies like I do. It’s possible another place might be more suitable even though they didn’t live in it.

  ‘You mean you’re rearranging history?’

  ‘History could sometimes be tidier than it is,’ she said.

  ‘Think of all the unlikely things that happen. I want to eliminate unlikely things from this production.’

  ‘And Devon Villa’s unlikely?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t seen it. But it’s a big house, I know that, and quite grand, though it had seen better days even when Maria Hyde first came there. Somehow it’s not quite the sort of place you’d expect people like that to have lived in.’

  She was on her way over there. I said on an impulse that I’d go with her, though up till then I’d held out and said I wasn’t interested. But things had changed. My feelings for her had changed. I’d no objection to being with her and thought I might enjoy a day in her company. Now that I knew too whose identity Swanny had assumed in her last years, though there was no possibility of that identification being correct, I wanted to see the house where the child Edith had lived.

  Cary, as the producer of the proposed serial, had an appointment with the owner of the ground floor and basement at Devon Villa and the owner of the flat on the first floor. The second and third floors were currently empty, the owners being away in Morocco, but the people downstairs had a key and would show us over the room where the bodies of Lizzie and Maria had been found.

  She had been right about the house being grand. In Hampstead it would have been a stately residence but here the shabby neighbourhood detracted from its snob appeal. The whole terrace was more the kind of thing you see in Bayswater, Victorian classical, long sash windows, a flat stuccoed front, steps up to a front door inside a pillared porch. Devon Villa had been renamed Devon Court and there were three bells alongside the front door. I began to understand what Cary meant about unlikely things as soon as the woman who introduced herself as Brenda Curtis had let us into her flat. Once the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood were excluded and the front door closed, we might just as well have been inside one of the flat conversions next door in Willow Road.

  The entrance hall had seemed promising, for the red marble floor mentioned by Ward-Carpenter was still there and unchanged, as were the carved balusters of the staircase. The chair rail that traversed the walls was surely a hundred years old and the lincrusta with its pattern of stylized leaves and flowers in relief. Now, of course, it was painted white, which Maria Hyde would probably have associated only with bathrooms, and the woodwork was white but for those mahogany banisters. But in here, where Brenda Curtis and her husband had the two, now three, rooms on the ground floor and the three more in the basement, we might have been in a house built last year, though built of course in a neo-Georgian way with arches and alcoves and recesses and, incongruously, an open-tread staircase descending to the basement.

  ‘I don’t know that I should care to live in the second-floor flat,’ she said as she took us down to where Florence Fisher had had her domain. ‘The Mannerings are away a lot, so perhaps it doesn’t worry them. And they’ve got quite an obsession about keeping things in period, so of course it’s clean up there but not really changed much. They sleep in that room, you know.’ She gave us a sidelong look. ‘The one where they found the bodies, I mean. I shouldn’t like that myself.’

  We murmured, no, no indeed, we shouldn’t like it either.

  ‘When we came seven years ago nothing had been done down here. The place was just the way it must have been when Roper lived here. A very old woman had the basement, she’d lived here alone since she was thirty and she died here, and I don’t think she ever put a coat of paint on it. It didn’t look like it, anyhow. She kept the kitchen just the way it had been when Maria Hyde had it and when we came it was infested with black beetles. There was a room over there no bigger than a large cupboard where the poor little maid-of-all-work slept. The scullery was in this part, nearest to the outside, and would you believe it the old copper was still there, a dreadful old stone and plaster thing with a wooden lid. The estate agent said it was a collector’s piece like the kitchen range but we had it out. We altered everything and made it all spacious and airy, so you can’t really imagine how it was.’

  A french window gave off the Poggenpohl kitchen on to a paved and walled garden. A tabby cat was sitting on the rim of a fish pond between stone tubs of bay trees. Only the garden walls themselves looked as if they might be the originals, ten feet high and of brown brick blackened by ancient, long-forbidden smoke. Where the police had found the bread knife stood a raised bed, built up with a stone wall, and filled with dwarf conifers.

  My head was full of Edith, but as this woman had said, it was impossible to imagine her in this kitchen, seated at a table, eating her porridge while the maid bustled about. By gaslight perhaps it had been, for little daylight could have penetrated down here even on a July morning. There had very likely been a window or two giving on to an area but that too was hard to re-create in the mind.

  Before we went up to the first floor we stood at the foot of the staircase, glad to leave Mrs Curtis behind her own front door, and thought of Edith climbing those stairs that last time she was seen, mounting them on legs that were too short, vanishing from view round the curve at the top. We were halfway up ourselves when the owner of this floor heard us and came out on to the landing.

  ‘You won’t see her at this hour,’ he said.

  Cary asked who it was we wouldn’t see.

  ‘Edith.’

  He seemed to enjoy the effect this had on us, the widening of our eyes perhaps.

  ‘Only a joke, ladies. Don’t look so worried. I’ve never seen her and I’ve been here ten years.’

  ‘A ghost?’

  ‘So they say. The woman upstairs, Mrs Mannering, swears she saw her once. You want to take more water with it, I said. Don’t be daft, she said, you know I don’t drink. I saw her on the stairs. It was when I came in last night just before midnight.’ He had plainly told the story many times before and made himself word perfect. An elderly man who lived alone, he had perhaps made this re-telling of his own domestic ghost story the high spot in an otherwise dull life. ‘I was at the foot of the stairs, she said, and I looked up and saw this child climbing them.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Cary said.

  ‘Not a lot. She disappeared round the bend and that was the last of her. Round the bend is right, if you ask me. Mrs Mannering saw her again on another occasion and then that Mrs Curtis downstairs saw something. Anyway, she screamed out, though she wouldn’t say why but she won’t go out in the entrance after dark on her own any more.’

  This was all very gratifying to Cary. I could see it was giving her all sorts of ideas for the programme. It made me feel warmly towards her and pleased for her and it was then that I knew why friendship had returned. I didn’t care about Daniel any more or the memory of Daniel or that she had taken him away from me. He had grown dim, he was just someone I’d once known. Her part in all of it no longer mattered, ‘it’ no longer mattered, because now I had Paul.

  I put my hand in Cary’s arm. She didn’t seem surprised but she made that warm and pleasant gesture that is the way people reciprocate when they’re pleased to be arm-in-arm with you. She gave her elbow, and my hand in it, a squeeze against her waist. I believe she thought the ghost story had sent a shiver down my spine. We walked together into the old man’s flat, into the bedroom that had been Edith’s. Mr Wagstaff stood prou
dly by, gratified I think that nothing remained here of that past. The windows were hidden under double glazing and the walls under paper encrusted with peach velvet roses.

  Upstairs, another floor up, it was different. Mrs Curtis had been right when she said things had not changed much. They had been very deliberately and self-consciously retained or the originals copied. For instance, all the lighting was made to look as if the power which came through was from late-nineteenth-century sources. The table lamps were converted oil lamps and the overhead lights had the kind of fluted shades of etched glass that used to be over gas mantles. The picture rails were still there but I doubt if the ceilings on this level of a house would have had fruit and flower mouldings. They had them now because the Mannerings had put them there.

  A thin layer of dust lay over everything. Mr Wagstaff’s stewardship scarcely extended, Cary whispered to me, to keeping the place clean. It was stuffy and smelt, as such places do when shut up over long periods, of dusty fabrics never shaken out, of old paper and airlessness.

  The Mannerings had filled it up with turn-of-the-century junk and a few good Edwardian pieces. There was one of those black horsehair sofas that remind you of old railway waiting rooms and must be impossible to sit on without gripping the arms or sliding off. The crimson velvet which proliferated looked as if it needed a Florence Fisher to come and beat it with one of those cane flails. Everywhere on the walls hung old sepia portrait photographs in arts and crafts frames, the kind you see in pubs where the landlord thinks they are trendy. I’m sure these weren’t the Mannerings’ ancestors but no one in particular, just photographs they had picked up in junk shops. But it’s curious to think that, unlike paintings, they must of necessity have been of real people, these people were alive once, someone’s lovers, husbands, wives, mothers and fathers, who went to sit for their likenesses and hated or loved or were indifferent to the result. And here they were, nearly a hundred years later, brought to this, an immortality of a kind, but a suspect one. For those who have bought and framed your likeness and hung it up have done so not because you were beautiful or good or clever or arresting but merely because you amuse. You provoke visitors to ask, whoever is that extraordinary woman or that peculiar man? Look at their clothes, their hair! Do you suppose they ever thought they looked nice?

  Cary said to me afterwards that she felt a deep distrust of people who made a joke of their environment. What kind of a person can it be who surrounds himself with ‘fun’ objects, who purposely discards beauty in favour of the amusing and comfort in favour of the grotesque? Doesn’t he or she tire of it? And if so, what happens then?

  The Mannerings had apparently not tired of it. On the other hand, they were away a lot. Perhaps the freshness of the joke was renewed each time they came back. It was hard to escape the idea that they had made their bedroom the ‘funniest’ place because it was there that the murder had happened. What other reason could there be for the upside-downness of the flat? Their living rooms were on that top floor that Maria Hyde had closed off.

  Cary and I looked at each other. She made a face. Roper’s portrait was up on the wall with Lizzie’s beside it, the photographs from the Ward-Carpenter account, hugely enlarged and framed in ornate gilt. It was a brass bed the Mannerings shared, no doubt a copy of the one on which Lizzie’s body had been found. A white cotton counterpane covered it. The window curtains were of dark pink rep with lace half-curtains. On each of the marble-topped bedside cabinets stood a lily-shaped art nouveau lamp, not the genuine article but the kind of thing most chain stores have in their lighting department.

  ‘You’ll know who those two are.’

  Mr Wagstaff pointed at the framed portraits. He began to chuckle. He too found them amusing. It made me wonder if the majority of humanity would find this kind of thing entertaining. What he said next put it all out of my head. ‘An old lady and two young fellows came to look at this flat a couple of years back. She was very taken with the photos. She wanted to buy them but I had to say it wasn’t up to me. Would I ask Mr and Mrs Mannering, she said, and I said I would, yes, next time they were home but I never did. I didn’t feel like I could take it seriously, she was a little bit—’ he tapped the side of his head—‘if you know what I mean.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  He looked at me rather suspiciously, as well he might. ‘Tall, very thin. She had a hat on, which ladies don’t so much these days. You know her, do you?’

  So it was here that they had come, Swanny and Gordon and Aubrey, not to Lavender Grove as I had taken for granted. They had come here, to where the Ropers had lived.

  ‘How did she get on to you?’

  ‘Came to the front door, I reckon, and Mrs Curtis sent her up to me. Can I see upstairs, she said, and I said I didn’t see why not. She wasn’t the first, you know. Folks do come from time to time and Mr and Mrs Mannering have got no objection. The stairs bothered her, she said she had arthritis, one of the young chaps had to take her arm.’

  Swanny had taken those photographs for pictures of her parents. No wonder she had wanted them. I felt a rush of pity for her, standing here where we stood, trying to match her features, as they had been and as they now were, to a mouth, a nose, an eye, a head of hair, in the faded, grainy, brownish faces that looked down unsmiling. And, in the event, she had never acquired them. Mr Wagstaff hadn’t taken her seriously.

  A thought struck me that seemed terrible. ‘Did you tell her your ghost story?’

  He smiled. ‘I certainly did, thought she’d like it.’ It was obviously something he regularly told to the ‘folks who come from time to time’, in the tradition of the guide in Holyrood Palace who used to point out a brown stain on the floor as the remains of blood shed by Rizzio when he died.

  ‘Did she like it?’

  ‘She didn’t believe it. She said it couldn’t be because the living don’t have ghosts and Edith was alive.’

  We went down the long staircase that Edith had climbed and climbed. No one knew how far she had reached. Perhaps no further than the first floor, had gone into her own bedroom—and then what? Could she have fallen from the open window? But if someone had found her wouldn’t an alarm have been raised?

  Or perhaps she had gone on upstairs. I tried to construct some story of her grandmother still being alive then, of the old woman struggling with her from that place to a safer one, giving her into someone’s care before she herself died.

  Mr Wagstaff seemed disappointed that Cary didn’t immediately make him an offer of £500 a week for the use of his flat over an indefinite period. I rather admired her firmness, her refusal to commit herself or her company to anything, and it made me understand how little we know of our friends as professionals, what they are like as working people. That side of her I had never seen before, that smiling, polite yet adamant side.

  ‘Nothing has been decided. If we want to take it further we’ll be sure to be in touch.’

  She said to me, when the door was shut and we were going down the steps, ‘It won’t do at all. It’s too tarted up. That bedroom’s right in the wrong sort of way.’

  ‘Where’s the other house?’

  It was in the street where Paul lived, Middleton Road. I didn’t tell her so and felt a sudden unwillingness to go there. It was Saturday, he would be home and might see us. We were due to meet that night, he and I, but still I felt a ridiculous reluctance to be seen by him on his street with her.

  ‘We can go there, if you like. I can’t very well take you inside, I haven’t an appointment, but you can tell me what you think from the outside.’

  ‘Oh, no, we don’t have to.’

  ‘Yes, really, I think we will. I quite like the idea. After all, we’re here. One doesn’t exactly pass through Hackney on one’s way anywhere, does one? We should take advantage of the opportunity. It’s not very far. One can walk it. I mean, even I can walk it.’

  ‘Cary,’ I said, ‘they were all supposed to be ill, Maria Hyde, Lizzie Roper and Florence Fisher. Lizzie
took to her bed at five in the evening with whatever her illness was. Next day Florence was taken ill. What was the matter with them? Was it something infectious and has anyone ever thought to ask?’

  ‘We know what was wrong with Maria. She died of cardiac arrest. Lizzie, of course, was being doped up by Roper with that bromide stuff. Apparently it makes you feel sick and it sedates you if you have too much of it. And he could never calculate how much she would take, could he? Florence says she sometimes took three teaspoonfuls of sugar in a cup of tea. Well, suppose she sometimes had two or three cups?’

  I said that Florence didn’t take sugar. Florence wasn’t doped up with hyoscin hydrobromide.

  ‘I’ve often thought that Florence exaggerated all that about being so ill. Tate-Memling got to the heart of it when he wanted to know what she was doing as one employed to clean the house and in fact not going up to the second floor until a week had passed. The truth probably is that as soon as her employers were out of the way she just skived off but she wasn’t going to tell the court that. If you were a domestic servant in 1905 and you skimped on your work or admitted to hating it, that was tantamount to immoral behaviour.’

  ‘It was odd she didn’t carry up the tray but left Maria to do it. Maria obviously had a heart attack earlier in the day.’

  ‘She was better by then. I don’t know all the answers, Ann.’

  ‘Did the police ever suspect Florence Fisher of making away with Edith? Was she questioned much? She never seems to have been a suspect, yet she was the last known person to have seen her alive.’

  ‘I did think of that myself but as far as I can discover they never for a moment suspected her. Perhaps she gave a great impression of honesty and probity and all that and it may be that she had absolutely no motive for killing the child. She seems to have been fond of Edith. Why kill her? Even after all this great long time, she does impress one as a strong, honest sort of person.’