Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘There was Florence.’

  30

  IN A MOMENT options were gone and it became the only thing, the inevitable thing. The pieces began to drop into place. We turned away and walked down Navarino Road in silence while I thought of the implications.

  Florence Fisher was engaged to be married but she hadn’t married, not then or ever. She had kept a tobacconist’s shop and had her photograph taken in WVS uniform with the Marchioness of Clovenford.

  Did she relate the fact of her pregnancy to Hansine when the two women first met in early July? That pregnancy may not have shown much, especially if Florence was a big woman, as we have been told she was. But perhaps she told Hansine, or admitted to Hansine what was too evident to be concealed.

  ‘Was it known, d’you think? Did the Ropers know?’

  ‘I think so. Roper gave her the sack but Maria Hyde reinstated her,’ Paul said. ‘We’ve never really known why. It gets a lot clearer if she was pregnant. Employers sacked their servants for getting pregnant. It would have horrified the strait-laced Roper but wouldn’t have much affected old Maria, whose own daughter was supposed to have had a baby before Roper met her. She’d have had to go when the baby was born. No householder in those days would have let a maid keep a child with her.’

  I hardly noticed where we were going, Paul and I. I went with him, walking beside him as he led me southwards, and we were in Lavender Grove before I realized it. This was the way Hansine had come with the baby in her arms and the little boy running along by her side. It had been a hot day probably, hotter than today, and the new-born child, Florence’s child, ran no risks.

  For the first time I looked at that house where Asta lived when she came to London.

  The little faces are still there, the young women’s faces in stone with stone crowns on their heads, one above the porch and one under each of the upstairs windows. Asta sat inside that window, waiting for her baby to be born, and watched the boys playing with their hoops. Outside here, where someone had parked a Land Rover, Rasmus had once left that car called a Hammel in the days when almost no one had cars. In the big bay window hung the lace curtains Asta refused to have.

  We had slipped into the way of asking each other questions.

  ‘Why did Swanny celebrate her birthday on July the 28th?’ Paul asked me.

  ‘Probably because she was born on that day and Asta knew it. She was born on Friday, July the 28th and perhaps for a time Florence thought she could keep her. The Ropers weren’t there, after all. Or perhaps she didn’t know what to do about the baby. She wouldn’t have known how she was going to live, who would employ her, whether her boyfriend would still marry her. In some ways Asta losing her own baby was a godsend. Here was someone—a lady—who actually wanted her little girl.’

  ‘Did Florence deliver the baby on her own? In that hole off the kitchen where she had her bedroom?’

  I said we’d have another look at the diaries and the Ward-Carpenter piece on Roper. We’d go home now and have recourse to our documents. Back in Willow Road we spread the lot out on the table in front of us, the diaries, the originals of the diaries, the Ward-Carpenter account, the trial transcript, the Neergaard pages and Paul’s translation.

  Quoting Ward-Carpenter, Paul said, ‘ “Why Florence was so determined to stay in what was hardly a sinecure, where she was ill-paid and overworked, is unclear.” It’s not unclear, is it, if you know she was seven and a half months pregnant and had nowhere else to go. At least at Devon Villa she had a roof over her head.

  ‘A few pages on he says of Florence that when she came back from shopping on the morning of July the 28th, “she had begun to feel ill”. We’ve always wondered what that illness was. We could account for Lizzie’s as the result of taking hyoscin and Maria’s because her heart was bad, but not Florence’s. Florence was going into labour.

  ‘And all this accounts, of course, for Florence’s lack of curiosity as to what was going on upstairs or what had gone on. She had troubles of her own to think about. At the trial Tate-Memling made a lot of Florence not using the bread knife for three days. “She went for three days from the evening of July 27th until July 30th without a morsel of bread passing her lips.” That’s less surprising if you know she was having a baby during that time and was possibly quite ill. The court was amused by those digs he had at Florence because she didn’t go upstairs to clean until August 4th, although she was employed to clean the house. I’d say the last thing she was interested in was the state of the rooms on the second floor.

  ‘Her pregnancy and imminent delivery is also a reason for her not carrying that tray upstairs for Maria. We now know why she didn’t. Even Ward-Carpenter says she had to “take to her bed and remain there for the next two days”.’

  ‘Was she quite alone?’ I found the thought appalling. After eighty-six years it was still unbearable.

  ‘I don’t think she was,’ Paul said. ‘Have a look at the Neergaard pages. Look at the entry for July 29th. Asta writes, “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 heard her come in at two,” and then she speculates as to whether my grandmother has a lover. But we know where she was. Apparently, she had some reputation as an amateur midwife. She was round at Devon Villa, helping to deliver Florence’s baby.’

  ‘Swanny,’ I said.

  ‘Swanny. My grandmother knew who she was better than anyone because she delivered her. And we know Swanny was indeed born on July 28th, probably just before midnight, if Hansine got home to Lavender Grove at two.’

  ‘Did Asta know?’

  ‘Not then. I think my grandmother told her about Florence’s baby after her own baby was born dead. Perhaps some few hours after that.’

  There was something it had never occurred to me to ask him. ‘What did you call her?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hansine. Your grandmother.’

  ‘My mother wouldn’t let me call her Mormor. I called her Gran. Why?’

  ‘It was a daring thing she did. She must have been a woman of character. I wonder if Asta’s baby was a boy or a girl. And I wonder what they did with him or her, what they did with the body. Buried it in the garden?’

  ‘Probably. I don’t think we’re going to suggest someone should dig and see, do you?’

  ‘Asta never said a word about it. Not a word. I suppose she forgot, she made herself forget. They only lived in that house till the summer of 1906.’

  ‘So when was Asta’s dead child born?’

  ‘On the night of August the 1st. Hansine went to fetch Florence’s baby on the afternoon of August the 2nd.’

  It was no wonder Asta so much disliked—and feared—Hansine. Hansine had done so much for her and knew so much. Only once does she say an even moderately generous thing about Hansine and that’s when she considers sacking her for telling Swanny her mother can be unkind—‘we’ve been through so much together…’

  ‘Who was Swanny’s father?’ I said. ‘It can’t have been Roper, can it? Swanny thought Roper was her father.’

  ‘But that was only when she thought Lizzie was her mother.’

  ‘True. Anyway, Florence may have appeared for his defence but she didn’t like Roper. She was engaged, the father was the man she was engaged to. What do we know about him?’

  ‘Not much and what there is is all in Ward-Carpenter.’

  ‘And a bit in Cora Green,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t mentioned by name at the trial.’

  Paul found the relevant piece in Ward-Carpenter and there certainly wasn’t much. The fiancé’s name was Ernest Henry Herzog, ‘himself the grandson of immigrants’. This presumably refers to the fact that Joseph Dzerjinski was an immigrant. Ward-Carpenter says Herzog was in service with a family in Islington and describes him for some reason as ‘socially a cut above her’. No explanation is given for why they never married. Perhaps no one knew but Florence and Herzog. Ward-Carpenter says that at the time Roper sa
cked her, in early July, she still expected to be married the following spring.

  So why didn’t they marry? It can’t have been the reason Asta used to give for why a girl should preserve her virginity, that no man would want a bride who had lost hers. Florence was over seven months pregnant when Roper gave her notice, yet she still expected to be married. Therefore, her fiancé must have known of the pregnancy. Why did he leave her to give birth alone, in that empty house?

  Because she wouldn’t be alone. She’d have Hansine. For all he knew, she would also have Maria Hyde and Lizzie Roper. Because his own duties as a domestic servant prevented him being there. Did he perhaps still intend to marry her even after the baby was born, Paul asked. Possibly, he stipulated for some reason—he was too young? he would lose his job?—that he would marry her but wouldn’t take the baby.

  ‘But he didn’t marry her,’ I said.

  ‘It’s possible, you know, that when it came to it she wouldn’t have him. If he’d married her before the child was born that would have been all right. But the child was born and given away and she was free again. We tend to think of women at that particular time as all longing to be married, of having to get married, there was nothing else. Suppose Florence was different and she simply ceased to care for him, even ceased to fancy him. It’s possible that something may have happened to put her off marriage, now she didn’t need it for her personal safety.’

  I could hear a distant bell ringing, the way one does. It was very much the feeling I’d had when I looked analytically at the book jacket photograph of Swanny and saw in that strong Nordic face the shadowy features of someone I knew long ago. Someone, I thought now, I had seen, and last seen, at Morfar’s funeral when I was fourteen. But the bell rang on, the bell that Paul’s tentative explanation had set ringing.

  ‘I wonder if what put her off,’ Paul said, ‘could have been finding those bodies, Maria Hyde dead on the floor, Lizzie on the bed with her throat cut. No one seems to have considered what she thought. No one really treated her like a human being at all, they didn’t seem to think of her as having feelings. For instance, she must have had her own ideas about who killed Lizzie. No one cared about her ideas so no one asked. She was a witness for the defence. But, in spite of that, did she take it for granted as everyone did, as the police certainly did, that Roper had killed his wife? She had seen enough of marriage in that house to make her think seriously about embarking on it. Was finding Lizzie with her throat cut the last straw? She had no child to bring up now, Mrs Westerby round the corner had adopted her child, she felt differently about her fiancé anyway now the birth was behind her. Was this what marriage came to, the ultimate assault, this violence done to a wife? She had already taken steps to get new employment. She would take the job, move up to Stamford Hill and never see her fiancé again.’

  I said slowly, ‘There’s something in the diaries about it.’

  ‘Something in the diaries about what?’

  ‘About a girl throwing her boyfriend over. I can’t remember where or even in which volume. It may have been Asta’s cousin Sigrid, it may have been the daughter of some friend.’

  ‘Is it relevant?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s relevant.’

  We set about looking. There was nothing in the Neergaard pages, which is where we looked first. I even thought I might have remembered it because those bits of the diaries were the latest I’d read. Then Paul began working through Asta’s originals and I read the volume from 1905 to 1914 that is called Asta.

  I don’t know how many thousand words there are but the Neergaard pages alone contain over 1,700. Paul wanted to know if I was sure that what had sparked off that vague memory was definitely in the diaries. Or might it have been in the Ward-Carpenter account or even in the trial transcript? It was the next day and we’d been reading for hours before he asked. By that time I wasn’t even sure any more.

  ‘It’s more likely not to have been in the diaries,’ he said, ‘because Asta probably didn’t know who Swanny’s father was.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s as direct as that.’ I wasn’t. That seemed almost presumptuous. ‘It may be no more than one of Asta’s stories. After all, if we’d attended to Asta’s stories earlier we might have guessed the motive for Ironsmith’s killing Lizzie and even that it was Ironsmith who did it.’

  So we read out every Asta story we came to but none was appropriate. I finished Asta a bit sooner than he did and moved on to Volume Two, A Live Thing in a Dead Room, 1915-1924. Paul remained doubtful about the source of my flash of recognition and returned to Ward-Carpenter. He wondered where Ward-Carpenter got his information from. How did he know Florence’s fiancé was called Ernest Henry Herzog? There was no mention of the man’s name at the trial, none of course in Arthur Roper’s memoir. It must have come from Cora Green’s story for the Star.

  ‘It didn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that and the man’s not mentioned by name. I suppose Florence could have told him herself.’

  ‘When did Florence die?’

  ‘Cary told me she thought 1971. The Ward-Carpenter piece was written in the thirties. I think he must have interviewed her. There are facts he couldn’t have got otherwise. How would he have known the names of Lizzie’s lovers? They weren’t mentioned at the trial. Cora Green writes about Middlemass but only by his surname and she doesn’t know if another man was Hobb or Cobb, but Ward-Carpenter does. He must have got Middlemass’s first name as Percy from Florence.’

  ‘So Florence told him she’d been engaged to a man called Herzog and he must have said that was an unusual name for an Englishman. It would have been a good deal more unusual in 1934 or whenever this was.’

  ‘And she said his grandfather was an immigrant as Mr Dzerjinski had been. She also told Ward-Carpenter he was in service with a family in Islington. Where does he get the information that Herzog was a year younger than Florence?’

  ‘Not from Cora Green, so from Florence herself.’

  Paul said, ‘Is there any more we’re going to know? Is there any more to know? This is who Swanny’s father was, Ernest Henry Herzog, a servant, aged twenty-four.’

  ‘I wonder what he looked like?’ I said.

  ‘Tall and fair and handsome, I should think. North German-looking possibly. Herzog is a German name. That can’t have been very pleasant for him when the war came nine years later. There was enormous prejudice against anything German. Orchestras even stopped playing Mozart and Beethoven.’ Paul looked at me. ‘What have I said?’

  ‘Oh, Paul.’

  ‘What have I said?’

  I hadn’t been able to find the piece I wanted about the man whose girl jilted him but I knew where to find this one. For some reason I remembered. It was the entry for March 20th, 1921, and I suppose I remembered it because in it there was the first mention of Hansine’s baby who was Paul’s mother. I found what I wanted.

  ‘ “… His grandfather was a German who came here back in the 1850s, and though his father was born in London and he was too, he had this premonition of what it would be like having that name if war came …” Paul, the translation you made for the last diaries, where is it? It’s 1966 I want, I think, or 1967, nearly at the end.’

  He went to find it. Margrethe Cooper had the last thirteen notebooks and was translating them. It won’t be a longer or a thicker volume, though, for Asta wrote less and less often in the last years of the diaries. When Paul put his own typescript in front of me, I found what I wanted in October 2nd, 1966.

  ‘ “I was twenty-four. It’s true I was in love and I meant to marry her but when it came to it she wouldn’t have me, she said something had happened to put her off men and marriage …” ’

  ‘Who are you quoting? Who’s speaking?’

  ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you know German. What does Herzog mean? Does it mean anything or is it just a name?’

  ‘It means Duke,’ he said, and I could see he didn’t know. The diaries seldom mention the name. Why should he k
now?

  ‘Swanny’s father was Uncle Harry,’ I said. ‘He was Harry Duke.’

  We sat, digesting it in silence. He had been twenty-four in 1905, a year younger than Florence. What happened to put her off marriage was the murder of Lizzie Roper, the death of Maria Hyde, the disappearance of Edith. Did he know he had a daughter somewhere or did Florence tell him the child was born dead? I was certain he never knew and Asta never knew. He told Swanny you could always see the parents in a child’s face but he couldn’t see his own in hers. Yet I could. His was the face her photograph dimly recalled to me, though I had seen him for the last time in the fifties.

  ‘I wish she’d known,’ I said. ‘She always loved him, she’d have liked him for her father. And Asta loved him. How strange to think of Asta saying she’d like Harry’s child when she had her all the time.’

  The first time Harry came to Padanaram Swanny had answered the door to him. He called her ‘this dear young lady’. He’d got to know Mogens in the first place because they came from the same part of London and Mogens had once lived in an area of Hackney he knew well. So there weren’t even many elements of coincidence in it, after all.

  I thought I’d dream of it that night and I wanted to. I even did the reverse of what Asta recommends for avoiding a subject to dream of—think about it before you fall asleep. Deliberately, I didn’t think about it, I thought of Paul and our life together and my happiness, but still I failed and I had to imagine the kind of dream I might have had.

  The sun is shining, the dull, half-obscured dusty sun of late summer in a city. There is a great deal of dust but no litter, no paper wrappings in the gutter, and there is no smell of fuel oil. Hansine comes down the steps of Devon Villa, with Swanny in her arms. She has closed the door behind her, for Florence can’t bring herself to see her off, to watch the child carried away to her new life. Florence is alone in the depths of the house, bereft. Tomorrow she will go to Miss Newman’s agency to find a new employer and the day after she will at last betake herself upstairs where an unimagined horror awaits her, where the only living things are the flies that feed on death. But that is to come. In the meantime she is a childless woman again, a woman who has yet to resolve what her future will be.