Asta's Book (16 page)

‘Your brother,’ he said to her, ‘told me he’d got a dear little sister but he never said she was a beauty.’

When she went over to Leyton, to Essex Road where he lived in half a big terraced Edwardian house, she found him alone, the daughter from the flat upstairs having just cleared away his lunch things, made up the fire and brought him the newspaper. When young he had apparently been as fine and tall a man as Paul Sellway’s grandfather Sam Cropper, only fair where Sam was dark, but age had shrunk and bent him. His face had taken on the pinkish-whitishness of a child that feels the cold. He had Parkinson’s and his hands shook constantly, but he was still funny and gallant and cheerful. He took Swanny’s hand and kissed it. No one knew where he had acquired this un-English habit, which so endeared him to Asta. He always kissed
her
hand and she loved it. Swanny told him everything. He was easy to talk to and a good listener. He had had to be, going about with Asta as he did.

At last he said, ‘She’s never said a word to me.’

Swanny wailed, ‘She won’t tell me! Could she have made it all up? Could she?’

‘I’ll tell you something, dear, for what it’s worth. I’ve heard all my life about it’s a wise child knows its own father but that’s rot, isn’t it? You can always see parents in a child and a child in its parents. It’s harder to tell with your own because you don’t really know what you look like yourself, you don’t see yourself straight in mirrors. But with others, when you know the parents and the children, you can always see. And when you can’t that means trouble.’

‘You knew my father,’ Swanny said. She corrected herself. ‘You knew Rasmus Westerby, you know Asta. Can you see them in my face? Can you see either of them?’

‘Dear,’ he said, ‘have you got to ask me that?’

She said she had to ask him that, she had to.

He was quiet for a minute. He held her hand. ‘Then the answer’s no. No, I can’t. I never have and it’s been a puzzle to me. That’s why I’m not surprised by what you’ve asked me, not a bit. You see, after we got to know each other well, your mother and me, after we got to be friends, I waited for her to tell me. I thought, the day’s going to come when Asta’ll tell me that girl’s not hers, that little beauty’s not hers, she adopted her. But it never did. I love your dear mother, there’s no harm saying that now, but you were too lovely-looking to be their child.’

He kissed her when she left, very tenderly. He promised, unasked, to ask Asta himself. If he did Asta told him nothing or nothing that found its way back to Swanny. Asta wasn’t at all pleased that Swanny had been questioning him.

‘The poor old man, plaguing the life out of him like that,’ she said. ‘He had tears in his eyes when he told me what you’d said.’

‘I simply asked him if he knew you’d adopted me.’

‘It was a shock for a poor old man with a bad heart. And of course the only result has been to make him think you’re a crazy woman,
lille
Swanny. As if you could be anything but my own child and my husband’s!’

‘But I’m not, Mor, you’ve told me I’m not.’

‘That doesn’t mean I want all the world to know it, does it? Have a bit of sense, please. Why ask him, anyway? You were fourteen before I met him. What would he know?’

‘He’s your closest friend, that’s why.’

A rather proud dreamy look came over Mormor’s face then, Swanny said.

‘It’s been a lonely life for him. He never remarried. I don’t suppose I’ve ever told you this, but he asked me to marry him. Oh, a long time ago now.’

Swanny was so exasperated by her mother at this point that she really wished Mormor had married Harry because if she had she’d be living in Leyton now and looking after him. ‘Why didn’t you?’

The sweeping glance in one direction, the wave of the hand in the other. ‘Oh, really, it wouldn’t have been suitable. It’s all right for you with your nice husband and your fine house but I didn’t much like it the first time round. Why risk it again? People change when they get married, let me tell you. I’d rather have a friend than a husband.’

Harry died a few weeks later. But he knew nothing, he had nothing to tell.

The years went by. Swanny told me she made the utmost efforts to stop herself asking Asta again to tell her the truth, but she couldn’t stop herself. She nagged Asta to tell her and Asta rejoined in various ways. She would say it didn’t matter, it wasn’t important, or else that she had forgotten or that Swanny should stop worrying about something which would only be significant if her adoptive mother had not loved her. She, Asta, plainly did love her, had always loved her best of her children, so why was she being so foolish?

Then Asta played her trump card, or she may have simply been tired of being nagged and playing games didn’t come into it. She was sitting down more by this time, though usually on the edge of the chair in a restless way. Not tense, though, she was never that. She put her head back and turned up her eyes, in the way the exasperated do. It is supposed to be a hangover from a time when people looked to heaven and asked God to grant them patience.

‘Suppose I said it wasn’t true, I made it all up?’ Swanny began to tremble. This was a more and more frequent reaction to her mother’s comments on the question of her origins. She would shake and sometimes her teeth would chatter. She looked at Asta, trembling, and Asta said, ‘Let’s say that, shall we,
lille
Swanny? I made it all up because I’m a bad old woman who likes to tease. That’s what happened and now we’ll say no more about it, let there be an end to it.’

‘And I suppose you wrote the letter?’ Swanny said scathingly.

One of those light shrugs, a sidelong look, a smile. ‘If you like. If it makes you happy.’

Swanny had made up her mind to do a daring and dreadful thing, a thing which at first she could hardly contemplate without shame. It was some time after Asta’s death before she brought herself to tell me. While she spoke, in a low voice, she looked away. She intended to take the first opportunity that presented itself to search Asta’s room and go through her things.

Her chance came when Asta went to stay with Ken and Maureen. This visit was unprecedented. Asta didn’t much like Ken, she used to say she’d never got over her irritation with him for changing his name. But Mogens had also called himself something else and she seems not to have objected to that. The truth probably was that she had never wanted Ken in the first place, she had wanted a girl. The son she had been fondest of was Mads, the baby who died. Swanny, in a rare fit of exasperation, once said that if
he
had lived he would certainly have changed his name and this, incongruously, made Asta laugh.

Ken and Maureen had often invited her to stay but she always refused. They had moved from the Baker Street flat when Ken retired and were living in Twickenham. Asta said she didn’t like suburbs. Hampstead was different, she wouldn’t call Hampstead a suburb, except the bit that was a Garden Suburb which wasn’t Hampstead at all to her way of thinking but Finchley. Always an explorer and observer, she had watched it being built. Ken and Maureen pressed their case again when Torben went into hospital.

He’d had a heart attack and had made a very good recovery. Swanny spent a large part of every day in the hospital with him. When Ken heard about this he told Asta she must be lonely in that big house on her own and he told Swanny it would ‘be a bit of a rest’ for her to have their mother off her hands for a couple of weeks. Asta, of course, wasn’t really on her hands, she wasn’t at all a typical ninety-year-old, needing care and attention. She was independent, she had all her faculties.

Swanny longed for her to go, she told me, so that she could have unhindered access to that room. She suspected her brother of some ulterior motive, though what she couldn’t guess, Asta had nothing to give and not much money to leave. Not, at any rate, what he’d call ‘real money’. Swanny’s miseries and the perpetual doubt she lived in had made her mean-spirited, she said. Probably Ken and Maureen were just being kind. Anyway, she didn’t care, she wanted Asta to go but knew better than to encourage her. It was Asta herself who surprised her by suddenly saying that she had never been to Kew Gardens. If she went to Twickenham, to the part where Ken lived, she could walk to Kew Gardens.

Not that she was interested in nature. She knew a rose from other flowers and somewhere in the diaries there’s a bit about beech trees, but also a line that makes it plain she couldn’t identify a horse chestnut. Kew was inviting because she wanted to see what bananas looked like, growing in the hothouse. After she had gone off in Ken and Maureen’s car Swanny went straight upstairs to Asta’s room on the third floor. She said she was compelled to it, as secret drinkers are to their tipple when at last alone, as others may be to masturbation or some fetish, though those words are mine, not hers. But the compulsion made her breathless and rather sick. She was addicted to finding out who she was.

Asta’s room was large, two rooms in fact, divided by double doors which were always open. She had her own bathroom. You could really say she had the whole third floor, for no one used the box room and she could have done so if she chose. I have said I never saw it and I never did until after Swanny herself was dead. Asta didn’t invite people into her domain. She was interested in them but she had no need of them. I never saw it until fourteen years after its occupant quitted it but of course I saw photographs of it in magazines and Sunday supplements, as everyone did who bothers to read features like that. This was the last home of the author of the diaries and therefore—at least, every time a new volume of diaries came out—very much in the news.

It was comfortably, indeed luxuriously, furnished, as was every room in Swanny’s house, but to me it looked bare, it didn’t look lived-in, and Swanny assured me she had changed nothing, added nothing and taken nothing away. Asta hadn’t been a hoarder, she was concerned with life, not the memorabilia of existence. The furniture in the room, the ornaments, were Swanny’s and they had been there before Asta came to live in Willow Road. All that was Asta’s was the Napoleonic bed and the dark polished table with the fruit-and-leaf carvings, the books, the photograph albums and a number of framed photographs, not standing on furniture in the usual way but hung on the walls: a gloomy sepia photograph of Padanaram, apparently taken on a dull day, several portraits of Swanny, my parents’ wedding photo and Swanny’s, a studio portrait of herself when young with a Copenhagen photographer’s name across the bottom right-hand corner and ‘Asta’ scrawled on the left like a pop star’s autograph.

Swanny had already been through Asta’s desk, or perhaps I should say the desk Asta used. If she used the desk. Swanny didn’t know. There was writing paper in the drawers and envelopes, an unused notebook, a surprising number of cheap ballpoint pens. Of course she told me all this with hindsight, she had no idea then of the existence of the diaries. She had no idea that the thick bound notebook lying in the top drawer was the last diary, the one Asta had abandoned two or three years before, had written in it the last line she was ever to write and finally closed it on the evening of September 9th, 1967. Nor did it register with her till long afterwards that September 9th, 1967 was the day after Harry Duke’s funeral.

Naturally, Swanny looked inside it. She was bitterly ashamed of herself but she neglected nothing, she scrutinized everything she could find. The writing was in Danish, which she could read but didn’t bother to when she saw dates in 1966 and 1967. Some years before this, a relative of Torben’s had died and left a diary she had written while living in St Petersburg in 1913. Her husband had been a clerk with the Great Northern Telegraph Company and they had lived there for a year in an hotel. When he heard about it Torben had great hopes of this diary, at last managed to get hold of it and was anticipating a picture of life before the Revolution with all kinds of fascinating political and social comment. It was certainly social. What he had got was nothing more than a pedestrian record of a young woman’s engagements, the parties she went to and the clothes she bought, with a daily commentary on the weather. Swanny remembered this when she had her mother’s last diary in her hands. She read a passage about a bad storm and a tree falling down in the garden next door, and put the book back in the desk.

The wardrobe doors were open as usual, to let the air circulate. There was nothing in there, she had looked before. Still, she looked again. Wincing at what she was doing, she felt in the pockets of coats Asta hadn’t worn for years, delved into ancient handbags. But Asta kept nothing, she didn’t even allow rubbish to accumulate in her handbags as most women do. It wasn’t that she was fastidious or particularly tidy. She didn’t want to be cluttered with the paraphernalia of living.

Swanny’s principal goal was the locked cupboard. The key wasn’t in the lock, so presumably Asta had taken it with her or hidden it somewhere. But this presented no particular problem. There were several lockable cupboards in the house and Swanny was right when she guessed that a key to one would be a key to all. She said she hated what she was doing but at the same time she savoured being alone in the house and knowing no one could interrupt her. I think she was nearly as nervous of Torben discovering her as of Asta. Her husband was a high-principled man, a bit of a stuffed shirt though his niceness counteracted this, and he would have been as deeply shocked to find her searching her mother’s room as if he had come upon her watching a pornographic film.

But poor Torben couldn’t interrupt her. Though recovering and soon to be home again, he was still in hospital. Asta was miles away, heading for Twickenham. Swanny opened the cupboard and found it full of clothes.

As far as she could tell these were much the same sort of clothes as in the wardrobe, only older. They smelt powerfully of camphor. Since Asta didn’t hoard and seemed to be without a trace of sentimentality, Swanny concluded she must have kept them in the hope of their returning to fashion one day. In fact, they would have done so, for in the year of Asta’s death ankle-length skirts came in. These dresses and ‘costumes’ dated from the Great War and earlier and there were one or two beaded confections from the twenties. Swanny was deeply disappointed. As it happened she was wrong about Asta’s motives. She intended to sell the contents of the cupboard and actually did so a few months later, having found a shop in St John’s Wood High Street that specialized in satisfying the new passion for antique clothes. She sold them and made a tidy sum, once more demonstrating her gifts as a woman of business.