Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  With that stroke Edith was sent away or else subsumed in the real Swanny, whoever and whatever that real woman was. She gave the impression of a great fear and a great horror just contained. As she lifted her head and attempted to compress her distorted lips, I would sometimes see in her eyes not that old tranquillity or newer despair, but straight simple fear. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I could say, no action I could take to change it.

  On that morning the night nurse came and woke me and I went in to Swanny. She could speak, she had always been able to speak, though she seldom did. Her lips worked constantly as if she were trying to say something. Her right hand, the mobile one, fluttered along the edge of the sheet, plucking at it, sometimes rubbing it between finger and thumb. A sign that ‘they were going’, the nurse had whispered to me.

  She was the first person I had seen die. The dead I had seen but I’d never been present when someone passed from life to death. I held her hand, the good hand that had feeling in it, and she squeezed my fingers very hard in her own. It must have been for about an hour that I held her hand and during that time the pressure on my fingers grew gradually weaker.

  Clare, the night nurse, was due to go but she stayed on after the day nurse arrived. They waited in the room, sitting in silence. We all knew Swanny was dying. Her lips continued to work, as if she were chewing bread, but the motion began to grow more feeble. The hand that held mine slowly relaxed its hold. She spoke and behind me I heard one of the nurses make a little sound, an indrawn breath.

  ‘Nobody,’ Swanny said, and again, ‘nobody.’

  That was all. Nothing else. Did it mean anything? Did it mean, nobody understands, nobody knows, nobody can go with me now? Or was she referring to herself? Was she nobody? Was she like Melchizedek, without father, without mother, and without descent? I shall never know. She didn’t speak again. Her throat rattled as the last breath was expelled from her lungs, her hand slackened, her mouth closed and grew still. The light went out of her eyes.

  Carol, the day nurse, came over and touched her forehead. She felt for a pulse, shook her head and closed Swanny’s eyes. I saw the youth come back into Swanny’s face, the lines fade, the cheeks and forehead grow smooth. It always happens, Carol told me later, they always get to look young like that.

  Clare and Carol said they would leave me alone with her but I only waited there a moment. Already I could feel the heat of life withdrawing itself and I didn’t want to touch Swanny grown cold.

  ‘Why do you think your mother waited so long?’ I asked Paul. ‘She was over forty and Swanny was fifty-eight.’

  ‘Something must have happened to set her off. It was usually some jealousy or resentment. Or a slight or the man or woman in question had done something to offend her. I wish I didn’t have to say that but I do. In the case of the man who was gay all he’d done was pass her by in the street without speaking to her.’

  ‘I always thought the person who sent the letter must have seen Swanny’s picture in the Tatler.’

  ‘That would have been enough to do it. Did she look happy and prosperous and well-dressed and beautiful?’

  I nodded. And then he laughed and I laughed. It wasn’t funny but who can claim we laugh because we’re amused?

  How did his mother know Swanny wasn’t Asta’s child? I asked him that and he said he supposed his grandmother had told her. His grandmother must have known. Asta and she were living in the same house. Asta couldn’t have given birth to a dead baby, somehow found a substitute live one, gone out in the street to find one or had one brought to her, without Hansine knowing at least something of it. Somewhere in the diaries Asta refers to her and Hansine having been through so much together. It’s clear she had a special relationship with Hansine, though not a very warm or sympathetic one.

  ‘Why would she have told?’

  ‘People find secrets a burden and as they get older they seem to weigh more heavily on them. Also, I suppose, my mother and grandmother scarcely ever saw your family. My grandmother would have thought them quite remote from my mother—she didn’t know her or she didn’t know her in that respect. You can imagine it coming up in a discussion about adopting babies and my grandmother saying it used to be easier than it is now, all you had to do was find an unwanted baby and take it on the way Mrs Westerby did.’

  ‘I wonder if that was the reason Asta kept away from your family,’ I said. ‘In the diaries there’s a bit about Asta refusing to ask your grandmother to her Golden Wedding dinner. I thought it was plain snobbery but now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘It all goes to show,’ Paul said, ‘that the way babies are adopted these days is better. Better do it through the courts all shipshape and Bristol fashion. Still, we shan’t be adopting any babies, shall we?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said.

  Paul and I went together to a private screening of Roper. The press weren’t there, it was mostly BAFTA members, but Cary was present of course and Miles Sinclair and the actor who played Roper and the actress who played Florence Fisher.

  We had a drink in the bar with Cary first. She was looking very handsome and pleased with herself, wearing a Chanel suit she mysteriously said had been bought for her in the January sales but had still cost over a thousand pounds. I asked her if she was pleased with the production.

  ‘I’m very pleased, absolutely thrilled in fact. But, you know, it turned into an investigation too—well, you know it did, Ann. I thought I was going to find out whodunnit and I haven’t done that.’

  ‘Did you expect to after eighty-five years?’ Paul asked her.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m such a fool sometimes. I suppose I thought the truth would emerge.’

  She gave us each a leaflet with a cast list and a photograph of Clara Salaman as Lizzie standing under a gas lamp. It was quite a big cast, the Roper family and Florence, the lovers, various policemen, the judge and counsel, Florence’s boyfriend, cab drivers, shopkeepers, the railway porter and Roper’s sister and brother-in-law. I was curious about Edith and saw she was played by twin sisters. They have to do that because of the law about the short periods of time very young children are permitted to act.

  We went into the auditorium and it started promptly at half-past six but first Cary got up on the stage and said she’d like the audience to see the two people who had made this possible, the scriptwriter and the director. She asked them to stand up, which they did a bit sheepishly. Miles Sinclair was a huge man with a bushy grey beard. He was sitting next to Cary, very closely next to her, and when the lights went down he slid his arm along the back of her seat. I wondered if he was the purchaser of the Chanel suit.

  What can I say of Roper?

  It was very good, it was entertaining, in fact it was enthralling. It wasn’t cheaply or sensationally made but subtly, almost intellectually and with real feeling for the time in which it was set. I’m sure there were no anachronisms. Anyway, just as they have read Asta’s diaries, so many people reading this will have seen Roper. I need not describe it. The difficulty with it was, for me, that it came nowhere near the pictures of life in Devon Villa, Navarino Road, that I had involuntarily formed for myself from what I’d read. The actors didn’t look like the Ropers and the house wasn’t like Maria Hyde’s house. There hung over it, I felt all the time I was watching, the ghosts of the many and various television productions concerned with Jack the Ripper which must haunt all producers of crime drama set in London at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.

  We never saw the murder committed, only dead Lizzie with her throat cut. No doubt it was my own fault that I constantly expected to see a dreadful figure with a bloody knife appear out of an alley. Needless to say, nothing like that happened. Cary and her scriptwriter had had no solution to offer, though we were left feeling, as readers of Ward-Carpenter and Mockridge must be left feeling, that Roper probably did kill his wife and got away with it.

  Cary had read Arthur Roper’s memoir and the letters between R
oper and his sister from the Ward-Carpenter collection as well as the contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial. The information she had got enabled her to bring in a few more characters but scarcely more enlightenment. Still, I’d enjoyed it and I told her so. Paul said he hoped it would put up the price of his house when he came to sell it. I was about to say that was the first I’d heard of his selling his house but by then Cary was introducing us to Miles Sinclair and in a way that left no doubt of their relationship.

  I was glad for her. Two or three years ago, if anyone had told me I’d be pleased to see Cary Oliver happy I’d have thought them mad, but I was glad. We made an arrangement to meet and all have dinner together. Miles Sinclair wrote his phone number down on one of the leaflets with the cast list—I gathered that Cary was more often to be found at his place than her own—and I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

  ‘You never said anything to me about selling your house,’ I said on the way back to Hampstead.

  ‘It was a spontaneous decision.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ I was for a moment breathless with terror.

  ‘It’ll take a long time to sell. It’ll take a year.’

  ‘But where are you going?’

  ‘I thought Willow Road in Hampstead. If you’ll have me.’

  I had forgotten about Lisa Waring. When Cary mentioned the name I had to ask who she meant. The planned dinner with her and Miles had taken place and we were all having our coffee when, quite suddenly, she said Lisa Waring had phoned her. She was here, staying ‘just round the corner’ from Cary’s office in Frith Street. Cary spoke as if this made it worse, as if it confirmed her as some sort of spy or nemesis figure, though she still knew no more than she had of what Lisa Waring had to show.

  ‘When are you seeing her?’ I said.

  ‘Wednesday morning. You’ll be there, won’t you? You promised to be there.’

  Miles gave her an indulgent look, as at an excitable child, but I wasn’t very pleased. Wednesday wasn’t particularly convenient. Still, it’s always easier not to cross Cary, something on which she has built a successful career. Crossing her leads to public scenes, wild accusations, tears and other dramas. She took hold of my hand.

  ‘I have to have you there in case she destroys me.’

  Lisa Waring didn’t look capable of destroying anything larger than a beetle. One of these creatures, scuttling across the floor of Cary’s ancient dirty Soho office, she trod on with precise deliberation as she was shown in. She trod on it, pushed the resulting squashed mess aside with the toe of a black running shoe and asked if it was true Mozart had stayed in the house next door when he came to London as a child.

  Having stopped smoking a week or so before, Cary had taken it up again, lighting a fresh cigarette as the girl came in to announce her visitor. The atmosphere in the little room was blue with smoke. Cary’s voice came out very hoarsely, she had to cough to clear her throat and then she couldn’t stop coughing. At last she managed to say that where Mozart had lived was now the entrance to the London Casino. Lisa Waring nodded in a sage way.

  It was obvious she had no documents with her. She didn’t even have a handbag, only a coat with pockets over her jeans and sweater. She looked to be in her late twenties, small, sallow, black-haired and with enough of a tilt to the eyes to show that one of those ancestors had been an oriental. I remembered, in that moment, that it was she who wanted something from Cary, not that she had something to impart to Cary or even threaten her with. Somehow we’d overlooked that, or Cary had, seeing her as a menace, almost as a blackmailer.

  And now she sat in silence, looking from one to the other of us as Cary introduced me, then casting down her eyes.

  ‘What exactly do you want to know?’ Cary said.

  ‘About my ancestor. My father’s grandfather. Where he came from, who he was.’

  I’m sure Cary was thinking as I was then, that it was easy enough to find out. Alfred Roper’s life was well-documented, as we both knew. This girl was probably like one of those students that were Paul’s despair, the kind that, in spite of training, teaching and advice, have no idea about research, where to find a source, how to go about it, where to look anything up, and anyway always prefer to get others to do it for them.

  She dispelled that fast. ‘I can’t. I’ve done my best. I’ve never come across the name anywhere until I saw it in your cast list.’

  I suppose that’s what gave me a hint we were talking at cross-purposes. ‘You’re not thinking about Roper at all, are you?’

  Of course I’d put that badly. She looked puzzled. ‘That’s the name of your production, yes. I know that. It’s my great-grandfather I’m interested in. His name was George Ironsmith and I want to know if it’s the same one.’

  26

  I TRIED TO REMEMBER who George Ironsmith was. The name was in the cast list on Cary’s leaflets, one of which lay on her desk. I looked at it and—ah, yes, Lizzie’s erstwhile fiancé, the one who gave her the ring with a glass stone. Cary produced photocopies of the Ward-Carpenter account and of Arthur Roper’s memoir and Cora Green’s story for the Star. She passed them across the desk and Lisa Waring looked at them, took a pen, said ‘May I?’ and started underlining words or names.

  ‘A George Ironsmith was this lady’s lover, right?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Cary said. ‘He was engaged to her in 1895 but the engagement was broken and he went abroad.’

  ‘Abroad where?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Cora Green says he had a “Colonial” accent, whatever that means.’

  Whatever it did, Lisa Waring didn’t look too pleased. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘At the time of the murder? Maybe between thirty and forty. For the production we made him about that. The actor who plays him is thirty-six.’

  ‘My great-grandfather George Ironsmith was forty-nine when he died in 1920, I’ve seen his tombstone. He was born in 1871 and that would have made him thirty-four in 1905.’

  Cary was immensely relieved. ‘It looks as if it’s him, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How can I find where he came from?’

  Cary suggested looking through phone books for the whole country. Each of us recommended the records at St Catherine’s House. I told her how to go about this kind of research and that she could probably pursue her ancestors back through The Mormon’s World listing of parish baptismal records. I suppose I was disappointed. What I’d wanted was a revelation that was exciting but not calculated to upset Cary’s reconstruction.

  But Cary was relieved. Like many people, when a burden is lifted off her back she becomes expansive. If Lisa Waring had told her, for instance (I’m fantasizing), that her great-grandfather was Arthur Roper, and he had once worked as a surgeon’s assistant and had been in London on July 28th, 1905, the last thing she would have done was agree to her request to ‘see the movie’. She hadn’t told her that, but rather that she was probably descended from a minor character in the drama, so Cary promised to send her the three Roper cassettes.

  Cary expressed her relief after Lisa Waring had gone by leaping up and hugging me and offering to take me for ‘a wonderful lunch somewhere’. It was over this lunch, which became protracted and swallowed half the afternoon, that she asked me something she said she had been wanting to ask me about for some time. What made me connect Asta’s household with the Ropers at all?

  ‘You connected them,’ I said. ‘That was what put you in touch with me in the first place. You wanted to know if there were any more references to Roper in the diaries and then we found Swanny had torn out those pages. It was you, not me.’

  ‘Yes, but I stopped making the connection when we found those pages were missing. Without any further references, which may or may not have been there, we don’t know and never shall. All you have is the link of Hansine coming across Dzerjinski dying on the pavement and the two or three references Asta makes.’

  ‘Six,’ I said. ‘There are six. And I know them by heart. The first one is when she writ
es about Hansine and Dzerjinski, the second when Hansine asks if she can have Florence Fisher to tea and the third when Asta goes to Navarino Road and by chance sees Lizzie Roper come out of the house with Edith. That’s when she says Edith is pretty and fairy-like and she has that odd experience of sensing that Edith makes some sort of telepathic contact with her unborn child. Then she refers to ‘the man who murdered his wife in Navarino Road’ without naming him. The fourth one is just what anyone might say, that is anyone who happened to be keeping a diary and lived nearby. It would have been odder if she’d left it out. The only reference that’s a bit strange is the fifth one because she makes it eight years later in 1913. It’s when Rasmus thinks Sam Cropper is an admirer of hers and she goes on to say that he ‘thought I was following in the footsteps of Mrs Roper’. Then, in one of the last notebooks, she records reading about the Moors Murders and it reminds her of ‘that business in Navarino Road’.

  ‘You mean it indicates that she had Lizzie Roper on her mind?’

  ‘In a way. Of course it could be no more than that Asta had never come across any other woman that she’d have called a “bad” woman.’

  ‘Lizzie could have been the only one she knew and we have to remember she’d actually seen Lizzie. Doesn’t she refer to her big showy hat? Women like Asta, that is, “good” women, were often fascinated by the other sort and that could account for her thinking of Lizzie after so long. But all this goes to show that there’s no real connection between Asta’s family and Devon Villa. I put it in your mind and it didn’t go away after we’d found those pages were lost.’

  ‘Surely because whatever it is may have been in those pages.’

  ‘But we don’t know it was. All we know is that Swanny Kjær found a clue to her own origins in those pages and the truth, whatever it was, wasn’t acceptable to her, so she tore them out. Oh, Ann, I’m so happy that horrid little girl—she was horrid, wasn’t she, so cold?—I’m so happy she didn’t come to tell me her great-grandfather was Arthur Roper and he’d written a murder confession on his deathbed!’