Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  July 29th, 1905

  I’m still waiting, still without pain.

  Meanwhile, I do my best to keep occupied, to think of anything except what’s going on—or isn’t going on—inside me. School has finished for the long summer holiday, so the boys are at home, running about and making a terrible noise. Thank God it never seems to rain any more and they can be outside in the street.

  Hansine asked for the evening off yesterday and I said yes, not wanting her fussing about me. As it was, she was out half the night. I couldn’t sleep, of course, and heard her come in at two. Can she have a lover? Anyway, I had the boys in here in the drawing room with me in the evening and told them they were to have a baby sister. I wasn’t taking a risk saying that. This time I feel so different from what I’ve ever felt before that I know it’s a girl, there’s no other explanation.

  It isn’t right to let them know all the horrible details at their ages. They have to be shielded from that for a few more years. But instead of that nonsense about storks and gooseberry bushes, I told them Hansine would go out and fetch the baby home when the time came. Of course they asked a lot of questions about where she would find her, would she have to buy her etcetera. I said they’d hear more about that when they were older. Then Knud said he didn’t want a girl, he wanted a boy to play with. Girls were no good. They lost interest when I gave them the bag full of cigarette cards Mrs Gibbons brought round this morning. Her husband must be smoking from morn till night!

  The place is alive with mosquitoes. I used to think you only got them in the country but they are everywhere. I hate it when you get one in your bedroom and are afraid to go to sleep lest the beastly thing bites you in the night. Mogens has got bites all over his legs. I’ve told Hansine to rub his legs with rock camphor and then bathe them in cold water.

  I know what is wrong. I thought this baby was a girl because I feel different, she, he, feels different. But I’ve realized, and I felt sick when I did, that it feels different because it’s upside-down. The baby’s head isn’t down where it should be but still pressing up against my ribs and its bottom or feet are down where it will have to come out.

  July 31st, 1905

  Hansine says she can turn the baby when labour starts. She did it for her sister. Do it now, I said, and she did try, massaging me with her great beefy hands. The baby shifted about and squirmed a bit but she wouldn’t turn over and the only result was that I was all over bruises. According to Hansine, it will be easy to turn her once birth starts and she gets moving. I don’t want a doctor, I don’t want a man doing it, that’s for sure. I must think of other things to take my mind off it.

  According to the paper, there are lots of people in hospital with mosquito bites. There’s a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans but we don’t get that from mosquitoes in Europe.

  A letter has come from Tante Frederikke all about her friend Mrs Hoist whose son, aged sixteen, was a cadet on the Georg Stage but who miraculously escaped when the ship went down. Not miraculously, I suppose. Fifty-eight of them were saved.

  The captain of the British ship, Captain Mitchell, seems to have done everything in his power to save the boys. They say he wept when he was a witness at the inquiry before the Danish naval court. The President of the court was very cruel in his attitude to him, blaming him for everything which earned him a reprimand from counsel for the defence for not being impartial. Anyway, Mrs Hoist told Tante Frederikke that there was another English vessel only 150 yards distant, which steamed away without offering any assistance. The Swedish steamer Irene, on the other hand, immediately responded to the signals and saved forty lives. I’m glad because I’m a bit Swedish myself and my favourite cousin Sigrid is a Swede.

  Erik’s best friend was drowned. He was a year younger, only fifteen, a boy called Oluf Thorvaldsen. The Thorvaldsens live up on Strandvejen, near where my father took that cottage once for a holiday. It’s all very dreadful, he was his parents’ only child and a brilliant cadet, top of his year. You can’t imagine how the collision came to happen. It was a bright starry night and the Georg Stage was only three miles outside Copenhagen harbour, on her way to Stockholm. The Ancona, out of Leith, was carrying a cargo of coal from Alloa in Scotland to Königsberg in Prussia, steaming twelve knots, whatever that means. The Georg Stage crossed her bows and drove nearly fifteen feet of her stem into the steamer’s side.

  But this did a lot more harm to the training ship than it did to the steamer. It went down in less than a minute and a half. Most of the cadets on board were asleep! There was no time to launch the lifeboats. The papers here and in Denmark said there was no panic, it was all conducted very coolly, but not according to Erik, Tante Frederikke says. The screams and terror were frightful. Boys were clinging to the wreckage and calling out to the sailors to come and save them. They were calling for their mothers, which they say men always do at the point of death. The Georg Stage now lies six fathoms under the sea.

  August 1st, 1905

  I said I wouldn’t write in this diary every day but I do it because there is nothing else. Hansine has taken over, looking after the house, caring for the boys. I am waiting. Today is the day I calculated she would be born but everything is still, expectant, waiting. I no longer go out, I haven’t been out since last Thursday.

  Hansine brings me the newspapers. The Kaiser has gone to Bernstorff Castle as the guest of King Christian. He’s calling himself once again a son of the Danish House, though on what grounds I can’t think. It would be monstrous if a Hohenzollern prince became King of Norway when there are Swedish and Danish candidates. But they say they are going to let the Norwegian people choose, which everyone must see is the proper thing.

  More on the Georg Stage. Not in the newspapers but a letter from Mrs Hoist. I was surprised because I hardly know her, have met her only a few times and she wasn’t invited to our wedding, which displeased Tante Frederikke a good deal. I suppose Tante gave her my address.

  She must have a very strange idea of geography if she thinks, as she seems to, that Leith is near London. She doesn’t want much, I must say! Only that I should find out Captain Mitchell’s address so that she can get in touch with him and thank him for saving her son’s life.

  Why couldn’t she have thanked him while he was in Copenhagen at the inquiry? Anyway, I should think there was considerable doubt as to how much saving Mitchell did and how much he was to blame. He said the Georg Stage abruptly changed course and he heard no bells from her, while Captain Malte Brun of the training ship said that the two vessels were almost parallel until the Ancona changed her course and he knew a collision had to happen. The President of the court believed Captain Brun, there’s not much doubt about that, even though Captain Mitchell said he’d been following a line he’d previously taken with a pilot to guide him.

  August 2nd, 1905

  Such a lot has happened! I am writing this in bed with my baby beside me. Things have worked out well. Once I had fed her and seen her fall happily asleep, I had this great urge to write and just record her arrival and my happiness. Is there anything to compare with the happiness that follows great grief, when all is made good, like waking after a bad dream you thought was real? My girl, my daughter, at last I.

  Here a page was missing. This was the page with too many intimacies or confessions on it to be given to Mrs Jørgensen.

  August 4th, 1905

  On Wednesday afternoon Hansine left Knud with me and went to fetch Mogens home from his friend John’s house in Malvern Road where he’d been playing since the morning. Mogens wasn’t surprised to see her coming along Richmond Road with a baby in her arms, it was what he had been expecting. ‘Hansine’s a stork, Mor,’ he said when he came running into my bedroom. Knud didn’t say a word, just stared. I sent them away and put the baby to my breast, which I must say was a relief to me and I dare say to her.

  The Princess of Wales’ baby has been christened John Charles Francis and Prince Charles of Denmark was among his godfathers. I expect they had h
im because they’re hoping he’s going to be King of Norway. I shan’t have my baby christened. What’s the point? It’s all a lot of bosh, anyway. She’s a very pretty baby, fairer than the others were. All babies have dark blue eyes but I think hers will stay that colour. Her features are very well-formed and regular and she has a beautiful mouth.

  August 18th, 1905

  This afternoon Hansine and I and the boys and Swanhild all went to Wembley Park to see a man try to fly. Isn’t it strange how all people want to fly? That’s what the nicest dreams one has are about. This man’s name is Mr Wilson and he thought he had overcome the problems of flying, but he hadn’t. His machine fell into the water.

  I would have liked to see the pygmies at the Hippodrome. They come from a forest in Central Africa and before they were brought here only four explorers had ever seen them. Apparently they are tiny people but normal, not like dwarfs, Anyway, I couldn’t go alone and Hansine couldn’t come with me because of the children. This, as far as I can see, is the only reason for having a man about.

  I’ve written to Mrs. Hoist. I had the brilliant idea of looking in back numbers of newspapers. We never throw them away in the summer, but are saving them for winter fires. There I found what she could have found if she’d thought of looking in the Danish paper’s account of the inquiry. So I told her that I couldn’t find Captain Mitchell’s address but she should write to him care of the company that owns the Ancona, James Currie and Company, of Leith, Scotland.

  Next week I must go up to Sandringham Road where the registrar is and register Swanhild’s birth.

  We looked at each other, Paul and I. I took the pages and his translation from him. There is a kind of disappointment so intense that it expresses itself as indignation.

  I had always known those pages, no matter who had torn them out, contained the answer. The answer would be there for us to see and that was why they had been destroyed. But I should have known, as soon as I had read Christiane Neergaard’s letter, that the answer couldn’t come to light in these circumstances. Asta might be careless, Asta might have little interest in what became of her diary once it was written, but she wouldn’t have given a stranger the account of an adoption that her husband hadn’t known about, that her daughter, the subject of that adoption, hadn’t known about.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. I feel angry. It’s ridiculous but I feel angry. Not a clue, not a hint. Swanny might have been Asta’s own daughter. I’m beginning to think she was Asta’s daughter.’

  ‘You’re wrong about there being no hints,’ Paul said. ‘Of course I’ve seen more of these pages than you have. I translated them, and I can find clues. The child hasn’t been born by the time she’s writing on August the 1st, though we know Swanhild Kjær celebrated her birthday on July the 28th. Have a look at the entry for August the 2nd. “Things have worked out well.” An odd thing to say, isn’t it, to indicate you’ve had a baby?’

  I thought it was, even for Asta, so cold-blooded sometimes, at others so passionate.

  ‘ “On Wednesday afternoon Hansine left Knud with me and went to fetch Mogens home from his friend John’s house in Malvern Road.” That means his friend’s mother’s been looking after him, the school being on holiday. Then Asta says he’s not surprised to see Hansine with a baby in her arms. That must mean there was no baby when he left home that morning. “Knud didn’t say a word, just stared.” So it’s pretty evident Knud hadn’t seen the baby before either. Indeed, Mogens says that Hansine is the stork who brought her. So what’s happened? Some time between the evening of Tuesday, August the 1st and the morning of Wednesday the 2nd Asta’s had a baby.’

  ‘A dead baby?’

  ‘I’d say yes.’

  I began trying my hand at this sort of reconstruction. ‘Hansine tried to turn the baby during labour, as Asta says she will. She fails and it’s a breech birth, during which the child asphyxiates? Why doesn’t she say anything about it? She couldn’t have known in 1905 that fifty-eight years later she’d want to give those pages to a historian because they had stuff in them about the Georg Stage.’

  ‘She does say something about it. In the page that isn’t there. When she went upstairs to get those pages for the historian she took that one out and destroyed it. Probably she screwed it up and put it in her wastepaper basket.’

  ‘And that page told who Swanny was?’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps it told only of Asta’s sufferings and loss. She writes of a “great grief”. That must refer to the death of her own baby.’

  ‘Then we’re no closer to finding out who Swanny was.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Paul.

  Next day Gordon came round in a hired van to take the doll’s house away. He had offered to transport it across London when there was an idea of giving it to his niece, Gail’s daughter, Alexandra Digby. But Alexandra, never having been much for dolls, announced at the age of eight that she intended to be an engineer and didn’t want Padanaram, so we had to find someone who did, someone preferably who would love it. Even before we were married Paul and I had decided it was a wicked waste, hiding it away on an upper floor at Willow Road, the possession of people who never looked at it from one year’s end to another.

  Uncle Harry’s youngest, the one whose birth in the twenties had brought Asta such pangs of jealousy, had long been a grandmother. Her granddaughter was called Emma and on some occasion, probably the only occasion any members of that family visited us, had seen the doll’s house and been lost in wonder and awe and, we later learned, desire. After finding out that her parents had room for it, we decided to give the doll’s house to Emma, and Gordon was as willing to take it to her as if his own niece had been the recipient.

  Asta would have liked it to go to Harry Duke’s descendant, I thought as we carried it downstairs. Swanny would have liked it. My mother, for whom it was made, certainly wouldn’t have minded. Before he left on his journey to Chingford, we showed him the yellowed sheets we had begun calling the Neergaard pages and the translation.

  It was Paul, of the three of us, who knew most about Hackney but he hadn’t spotted what Gordon pointed out. He found the relevant page in the London A-Z Guide.

  ‘What was Hansine doing in Richmond Road?’

  ‘Malvern Road, where Mogens was with his friend, runs south at right angles from Richmond Road,’ Paul said. ‘It’s still there, it’s all much the same.’

  ‘Yes, but Malvern Road crosses Lavender Grove. You wouldn’t go there by way of Richmond Road. It would mean a great detour. You’d go along Lavender Grove and turn right or left. You might just step into Richmond Road if the friend’s house was on the corner but you wouldn’t “come along” it, which is what Asta says Hansine did.’

  I asked him if we were to infer that Hansine had brought the baby she was holding in her arms from somewhere in Richmond Road, had been to fetch the baby from its natural mother and was on her way home to Asta when she picked Mogens up from Malvern Road.

  ‘Something like that. But not necessarily in Richmond Road. In some place that could only be easily reached by going along Richmond Road.’

  He drank up his tea and went off in the van, taking the doll’s house to where it would be appreciated. Paul and I waited five minutes before getting into his car and going up to Hackney.

  The area is supposed to be dangerous, people get mugged around there by night. Paul had never let me go alone to his house, he had always come to meet me. But in daylight it looks pleasant, quite elegant Victorian, a good deal cleaner I should think than in Asta’s day. No horse dung, for instance, no smoke, no yellow fog.

  I’d last been there when Cary and I went prospecting for locations and came finally to the street where Paul had lived. That was south of Richmond Road. Across here Cary and I had walked after inspecting Devon Villa as a potential setting for the film and gone on to Middleton Road. We had walked down here from Navarino Road, across Graham Road, turned right into Richmond Road, and leaving
Gayhurst Road school on our right, turned down Lansdowne Road, its name changed over the years to Lansdowne Drive.

  This time we started in Malvern Road, which runs parallel to Lansdowne Road on the west side of it. Mogens’ friend’s house must have been at the top on the corner and he watching from a window or standing in the front garden for him to have seen Hansine coming. If he saw her walking along Richmond Road she must have been coming from Navarino Road and in Navarino Road was Devon Villa.

  Paul and I turned right at the top and walked up there. It was a warm, almost sultry, afternoon. The trees were in heavy leaf, shading the place, sequestering it. In the afternoon sunshine it had a serene and gracious look. Those porticoed entrances at the top of steps, those gracefully proportioned windows, might have belonged to a terrace in Belgravia. Or nearly so, almost so, if you narrowed your eyes.

  We stood on the pavement and contemplated Devon Villa. The face of Brenda Curtis, occupant of the ground-floor flat, looked out at us from the window to the right of the steps, looked, failed to recognize me and turned away indifferently.

  On just such an afternoon as this, a warm August afternoon, Hansine came here and came by prearrangement. You could say she had an appointment. She had an appointment to collect a baby from this house some time in the afternoon of August 2nd. Upstairs in Devon Villa lay the bodies of Lizzie Roper and Maria Hyde but that fact was still unknown. It was not to be known for two more days. Roper himself was in Cambridge and his son Edward with him.

  ‘Florence Fisher was alone in the house,’ Paul said. ‘It must have been Florence that my grandmother went to see. Florence was her friend. Florence was the only person she knew at Devon Villa.’

  ‘Are we saying then that, in spite of the medical evidence and all the other evidence against, what Roper told John Smart was true, and Lizzie had been pregnant? Lizzie had given birth at some time before she was killed?’

  ‘Why Lizzie?’

  ‘There was only Lizzie.’