Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  She rang me up to tell me. The date was years after the Roper affair, December 18th, 1913.

  My cousin Sigrid told me that in the street next to them in Stockholm there lived a man who was condemned to death for murdering a woman. It was a strange story. He was married but he and his wife had no children and they desperately wanted a child. It must have been the wife’s fault because he had a child by his mistress who lived up in Sollentuna. The mistress refused to give up the child, she wanted him to divorce his wife and marry her, but he loved the wife, so he murdered the mistress and took the child for himself and his wife to adopt.

  It was just a story, I said. Hadn’t Asta been writing about guillotines, of all things?

  ‘I know it’s a story. I’m not saying Asta is doing anything more than referring to something she was told by someone else possibly ten or more years before. But it’s a scenario, isn’t it? It’s something that happened. It happened in Sweden in 1900 or whatever and it could have happened in England in 1905.’

  I said the child called Mary Ironsmith who accompanied George Ironsmith on the Lucania couldn’t have been Edith Roper. She was too old. Unless she was over two he wouldn’t have had to pay a fare for her.

  ‘Edith was too old to be Swanny Kjær,’ Cary said, ‘and now you’re saying she was too young to have been Mary Ironsmith. But look at it this way. He would have wanted to avoid too many questions being asked, wouldn’t he? Edith was a big child and she was walking. She probably looked two years old. Ironsmith had no way of knowing when Lizzie’s body would be found. He didn’t know Maria Hyde wasn’t alive and asking questions. It was a piece of luck for him they weren’t found for a week. By then he’d arrived in New York and no doubt was on his way in the train to Chicago.’

  ‘You’re saying that if he hadn’t bought her a ticket he might have been questioned about her age and he wouldn’t have been able to prove she was under two?’

  ‘More than that. He wouldn’t have wanted to be even suspected of travelling with a girl child of fourteen months. According to the passengers’ log book, Marconi’s Wireless Telegraphy was installed on all Cunard passenger boats. I’ll read you what it says: “The world’s news and weather reports are circulated by this means between isolated lines crossing the Atlantic, and passengers’ messages are accurately transmitted to the shore, even while many hundreds of miles from land.” ’

  Hadn’t I read, I said, that Crippen in 1910 had been the first murderer apprehended at sea by the means of wireless?

  ‘Ironsmith didn’t want to precede him by five years, did he?’ said Cary.

  The unwritten script we made, verbally, among ourselves, Cary and Miles, Paul and I, had Ironsmith asking Lizzie to give their daughter up to him as soon as he married. He had married a woman whom he knew could never have children and who wanted a child. Cary suggested he made a trip to this country specifically for the purpose of gaining possession of Edith, that he asked for her, offered to buy her, and when his efforts failed began making threats. Had it been in dread of Roper’s finding out from her former lover himself, that Lizzie confessed to her husband Edith wasn’t his? Did she preempt an uglier revelation?

  Miles believed Lizzie half-yielded. After all, it looked as if she would lose her husband if she persisted in his bringing up her child. As it was, he had gone to Cambridge without her and taken her son with him. He had already told her (Miles thought) that when she joined him in Cambridge after a week or so she was to come alone. The child could be left with Maria Hyde. Miles said he had never understood that arrangement whereby Roper and his son went to Cambridge and Lizzie was left behind. It would have been another matter if it had been a permanent separation but it wasn’t. Roper had evidently expected her the following Saturday. However, all was explained if Lizzie was left behind to spend the next few days finding a home for Edith or persuading her mother to keep her.

  But Lizzie loved the child, Cary objected. Lizzie wouldn’t have considered giving her up. Ah, but she might have done at the prospect of being a deserted wife and without means of support. No alimony in those days, no maintenance, for a woman who was a ‘guilty party’. Better to join Roper in Cambridge and maintain an outward respectability, especially if she knew Edith was being well cared for, was wanted and loved and getting a better chance in life than she could give her.

  ‘That’s all very well but she didn’t give her up to Ironsmith,’ Paul said.

  ‘Suppose she promised to do so and reneged at the last minute?’

  We considered this suggestion of Cary’s. No one had any information about the week preceding the murder. Ironsmith may have been at Devon Villa every day for all we knew, arguing with Lizzie, cajoling, persuading, threatening. At some point she gave in. It could have been the Tuesday or the Wednesday before Roper left. An arrangement was made for Ironsmith to come for Edith on the evening of Thursday, July 27th after Roper had gone.

  When he got to Devon Villa, letting himself in with the key he had kept since he was a lodger in the house, Lizzie told him she had changed her mind. She was keeping Edith and staying in Hackney with her mother. They would survive as they had in the past before Roper came on the scene. No doubt he tried to make her see reason but she was adamant. She hated Roper, she had no feeling for her son. Her little girl was all she had to live for.

  Ironsmith had a passage booked on the SS Lucania for Saturday, July 29th, two days off. He had told his wife he would be bringing the child. I kept thinking of Asta’s story and the man who had wanted his mistress’s child for his wife, had murdered her and just escaped being guillotined. Perhaps such stories proliferated, apocryphal tales founded on a single real instance, and then sometimes they came true. Ironsmith might even have heard such a story himself and made it true.

  He went back to Devon Villa next morning. It was Friday, July 28th. Florence Fisher had gone out to the shops at ten o’clock. Did he mean to kill Lizzie then or did he only mean to threaten her with the knife he took from the kitchen drawer?

  There was no sign of Maria Hyde. Edith lay asleep in her mother’s room, worn out perhaps with trying to awaken Lizzie who lay in a deep sleep induced by repeated doses of hyoscin. Why not just take Edith, then? She was Lizzie’s child and ostensibly Roper’s child, a child born in wedlock. If he left her alive, Lizzie would have told the police he had abducted Edith and taken her to Liverpool en route for the United States.

  So he wrapped himself in the counterpane and cut Lizzie’s throat. She knew nothing about it, she never woke. He was a slaughterman, trained to put living creatures swiftly to death. He took Edith with him to Euston Station and caught a train to Liverpool where he bought a one-way passage to America for a child over the age of two but under twelve. He sent a postcard he’d bought in Hackney to his wife and put an asterisk on it to indicate he’d got the child and would be bringing her home. They spent the night in Liverpool and on the following day boarded the SS Lucania.

  At first Lisa Waring was disproportionately angry. She wanted her great-grandfather vindicated as the true butcher he was; it was another matter altogether having her grandmother revealed as other than the Ironsmiths’ legitimate daughter. Cary and I were accused of romancing, of inventing and elaborating. She spent a lot of time on the transatlantic phone to her father and eventually got out of him that as far as he knew his mother had no birth certificate, he had never seen it and none was found among her effects when she was dead. Mary Ironsmith Waring had passed her childhood in Chicago, had married a New Jersey man and spent her entire married life in the pretty little coastal town of Cape May.

  A photograph among a number of photographs Spencer Waring sent Lisa was the best evidence. It showed Mary Waring in her wedding dress in 1922 and it might have been Lizzie Roper at her own wedding in 1898. Only the fashions were different.

  In this picture it is impossible to see much of the left side of Mary Waring’s face. For the pose is turned three-quarters away as Lizzie’s is in her photograph. But Lizzie, as far as
is known, had no mole on her cheek under the left eye while her daughter did. Lisa had never really known her grandmother, she died in 1970 when Lisa was seven. The many other photographs we saw showed no mole on Mary Waring’s face, but Spencer Waring wrote to say he remembered such a mole well and the cosmetic steps his mother had taken daily to cover it.

  It could never absolutely be proved that George Ironsmith had killed Lizzie Roper, but Edith was found.

  Though the worst panic was long past, Cary worried a good deal about her production. But since it offered no solution and made no claims to discovering Edith, Roper was transmitted as planned. Before the first episode was shown, Cary and Miles were already setting in train a kind of documentary about the making of Roper and the Waring revelations.

  Lisa Waring became their consultant. This was what she had wanted in the first place. She was highly excited by the whole thing and would have liked to see a semi-fictional series made with Roper exonerated and Ironsmith exposed. Cary baulked a bit at that, especially as Lisa’s father and two of his siblings were still alive and likely to live for years. What they did show in the production was how when Roper was finished Lisa had come on the scene and revealed the identity of Edith. There were clips from Roper, notably Edith as a little child climbing those stairs and disappearing into the darkness at the top. This was followed by a reconstruction of Edith’s life, her time with her adoptive parents, Ironsmith’s death, her own marriage and her years in Cape May.

  Making this seemed to give Cary more pleasure than all her work on Roper. Her worries, after all, were over. No more truths would appear. The answers were there and it seemed, so she told me, that whenever a problem arose or an unanswered query, Lisa was there with the solution. Lisa was invaluable and Cary was determined to take her on as her assistant for future productions.

  They went to the United States for the shooting of the American scenes. The last day of filming was Lisa’s twenty-seventh birthday and at the party they had for her she announced she was pregnant. Cary wasn’t too pleased because she could see herself losing her assistant, though she suspected nothing, was quite innocent.

  Next day Lisa flew back to Los Angeles. Cary didn’t go to the airport to see her off and it was some hours before she realized Miles had gone with her.

  After Paul had shown me the flaw in Gordon’s theory about Swanny’s parentage I stopped thinking I should ever find out the truth of it. It was all too long ago, it was too late, too much had been destroyed or never committed to paper.

  Cary and I, two childless women, had each adopted a little girl. That, at any rate, was one way of looking at it. She had found who hers was and in the process had lost her lover. I kept mine and abandoned all chance of discovering the infant Swanny’s identity. If anything at all had changed it was that the only person we had always known Swanny could scarcely be, we now knew she positively was not.

  I have searched this house, I have opened every book and shaken its pages, I have scrutinized the diaries, looking always for tiny pointers and infinitesimal clues. Where else is there to search?

  Over the years Asta wrote few letters. What writing she did was for that million-word-long novel, her diaries. Uncle Harry’s eldest daughter had returned to me the few letters she wrote to him towards the end of his life, the love letters he said were like Robert Browning’s. When the diaries began to be published Swanny’s second cousin had returned to her the letters Asta had written to his father. There is nothing in any of these letters to show that Swanny was not Asta’s own child.

  Photographs may have pointed the way to identifying Edith Roper; they tell us nothing about Swanny’s origins. When I look at the photograph on the book jacket, the studio portrait I chose for this latest set of diaries, replacing the full-length picture with the Little Mermaid, when I gaze into the familiar face, the strong handsome Nordic face, I fancy sometimes that I see some other one I once knew. Long ago, when I was very young.

  But perhaps it is only my grandfather Rasmus that I see. Or my mother who for years Swanny believed was her sister. I don’t know.

  It is an unsatisfactory way to end, I know that.

  29

  1991. THE PAGES CAME in a package from Copenhagen. It was just three weeks ago. I didn’t even open it on the day of its arrival but put it aside for that hour in the afternoon I keep for dealing with the larger items that come by post.

  When Swanny’s mantle settled on my shoulders and I took over the task of becoming editor of the diaries, I didn’t suppose it would be a full-time task. With the publication of the fourth volume of the diaries I expected, after the initial hype, a long lull in Asta attentions. I hadn’t anticipated the huge increase this new book would bring about in the mail I received and the requests for interviews, public appearances and, from newspapers, comments on practically every conceivable subject.

  Sandra’s successor, whose mind was a filing cabinet of Asta-lore, had left to marry a fiancé on the other side of the world. It was a choice between training a new assistant or doing it myself. The compromise I made still left me with a dozen inquiries to respond to each day and a pile of letters that only someone who knew the diaries as I did could answer. It may be true that authors of detective stories have outlines of murder plots sent to them, writers of romance love themes and those who produce travel books accounts by a reader’s ancestor of rowing up the Zambesi in 1852. I’ve heard that it’s so. Certainly, I regularly received copies of other people’s diaries; old manuscripts, new ones, barely decipherable exercise books, even journals kept by children as a project while on a school trip. They come from all over the world and a good many of them aren’t even in English.

  One per cent of these I send to my publisher. The rest go back where they came from, though I wish they would include return postage or an international money order. When the padded bag came from Denmark, forwarded to me by Gyldendal, I thought it was another one. A sample only, perhaps, a few pages to whet my appetite, because it was thin and it didn’t weigh much.

  I opened five parcels and two quarto-size envelopes before I came to it. Inside was a diary or part of one. But I didn’t notice this at first because that part of the contents of the bag was inside a cardboard folder. Attached to this with a paperclip was a letter and the publishers’ usual compliments slip. The letter was in English, the very correct English of the well-educated Dane. Her address was a district of Copenhagen, the date two weeks before. She appeared not to know Swanny was dead, nor that she had been a Danish speaker.

  Dear Mrs Kjær,

  I regret to tell you that my mother, Aase Jørgensen, died in November. I believe you knew her a long time ago and she was a visitor at your home.

  When going through her papers I made this interesting discovery. Of course, like everyone, I have read the famous diaries! I saw at once that these pages must be from Astas Bog. You have copies but I felt it right to send them to you as I believe these are the originals and they are of historic interest.

  My mother, as you know, was a maritime historian and for many years professor at the university. I have tried to account for these pages being in her possession and think Mrs Asta Westerby must have given them to her because of the references in them to the Georg Stage. In 1963, the date of her English visit, my mother researched that happening to prepare for the book she was writing on Danish naval history. No doubt she mentioned the subject to Mrs Westerby who then provided her with this data.

  I enclose the pages and hope they will be of interest.

  Yours sincerely,

  Christiane Neergaard

  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I opened the folder with trembling hands. We had looked for those missing pages for so long and always on the premise that it was Swanny who had torn them out. Never once had it occurred to us that Asta herself had removed them. It seemed impossible because we could never imagine a diarist defacing her own records.

  And yet it was so like Asta. I could imagine her, at that luncheon party Swan
ny gave in Aase Jørgensen’s honour on the very day the anonymous letter came, I could imagine her talking to Mrs Jørgensen, saying that she might have something to interest her, running upstairs to find the relevant diary while the desperate Swanny searched everywhere for her in vain. In her room she hunted quickly through the notebooks to find the first one. She didn’t want to be long, there was too much fun and food going on downstairs. Here it was, just where she thought, July and August 1905, and here the comments on Tante Frederikke’s letter. She found the passages she needed and tore out the pages. What use were they to her? What did she care? The writing had been all, now they were so much dead paper.

  Swanny, I remembered, had found Asta and the historian together in the dining room, looking at Royal Copenhagen china. The sheets of paper had been handed over by then, folded and tucked into Aase Jørgensen’s handbag. So lightly and casually are great wrongs set in train and tragedies precipitated.

  The pages were all there inside the folder, well-preserved, cared for as by a scholar, untouched by staple or paper-clip.

  The date on the top of the first one was the day after Swanny’s birthday, or the day after the day Swanny had been told was her birthday. But there were four sentences before that, the final words for the entry for July 26th that had seemed to end, ‘… they must ask their father, a sure way of postponing things for months.’ And the entry for August 2nd was incomplete, the continuation of it missing.

  I gave the pages to my husband and he translated them into English, reading them aloud to me:

  The baby hasn’t moved much today. They don’t in the last days before birth. I’ve been thinking about a story I read from one of the sagas, the one with Swanhild in it.

  I’m going to call my daughter Swanhild.