Asta's Book (34 page)

I didn’t buy the flat in Camden Town only because there was room in it for the doll’s house, but it was a selling point the vendors can’t have foreseen. When the time came it took up the whole of that room. Now that Asta was dead and, because of the diaries, the sheer bulk of them, had taken on a further dimension and become a woman with a secret life, the things she had made for the doll’s house also grew more interesting. Up till then they had just been miniature curtains and tiny cushions and tablecloths sewn with small exquisite stitches; now they were invested with her life. As I took them from the rooms and put them in the boxes and bags for removal they looked and felt different, for they were the work of a woman who between the times she sewed them was engaged in a totally disparate task, the committing of her daily life to innumerable pages.

It made her not quite the Asta, the Mormor, I’d known, no longer the doll’s-house-maker’s wife, but someone quite other, someone apart. It was rather as if I had come upon her in a room in Swanny’s house, sitting with her back to me, reading her Dickens perhaps, and when she turned round it was another woman’s face that she showed me. I asked myself what or whose that face might be but came up with no answers.

Paul Sellway was due to come to Willow Road at 6.30. I got to the house much earlier, worried in case it wasn’t warm or Mrs Elkins hadn’t been in to clean it. But as soon as I stepped into the hall and began putting lights on, I saw that it was perfect, it was as it always had been, a serene and lovely place, the temperature that of a fine summer’s day, smelling fresh but, as all houses should be, smelling of nothing. It gleamed as it had always done and everywhere were edges, surfaces, strands and facets of captured light.

On the hall table the Chelsea clock had stopped. No doubt, Swanny had wound it every evening. Now the gilt hands (two of those gleaming objects) on the small round face stood still at ten past twelve. As a child I had loved this clock for the two porcelain people who adorned it, sitting on top of a bank of porcelain flowers, the turbaned sultan in his yellow coat and his odalisque who lifts her veil for him alone. The last Bing and Grøndahl Christmas wall-plate was dated 1987. The first one, with two crows sitting on a branch, looking at the prospect of a city, had
juleaften 1899
round its border.

There would be a new one coming in time for Christmas. I went to the study, deciding to take Paul Sellway in there, and turned up the radiator, though it was as warm as the summery hall.

It occurred to me then that the diaries should be here, not upstairs, and I determined to bring them down before he arrived. They were heavier than I expected and there were more of them than I remembered, or rather I had forgotten how weighty each one of the sixty-three was. Four trips up and down stairs were needed to move the lot. When I’d finished I wondered where to put them. There was no vacant drawer in the desk, no empty bookshelf. Besides, I felt they should be put away somewhere, out of sight, out of dust. Probably, considering their past and potential value, they should be on safe deposit in a bank. But who would steal them? What use would they be to anyone who did?

Swanny had taken over the study, not when Torben died, she would have had no use for it then, but as soon as she began to translate the diaries. His desk became hers. Feeling quite daring, she told me, she bought a typewriter and set about teaching herself to type with three fingers, which after all is often the best and fastest way. Once she could handle the typewriter, translating became fun. She found herself sitting down every morning sharp at ten with Asta’s diary beside her, rendering it into English on the Olivetti.

I sat down at the desk, trying to put myself into Swanny’s shoes, turning the pages of the first diary and coming, inevitably, to the revelation. Or had she? Or was that discovery made before she bought the typewriter and while she was painstakingly writing it all down by hand? It must have been early on, that was certain, before I came back from America. She had sat here and it had burst upon her, the solution she had been seeking for ten years, or else it wasn’t like that at all, it was an anticlimax, a disappointment or a relief. It struck me then that she might have found out it was as Torben had always said; Asta was senile, Asta was wandering or hoaxing, she had made it up. On the page for July 28th (or the 29th or 30th or sometime about then) she read that she was indeed Asta’s own daughter, born of her own body, delivered on July 28th in Lavender Grove, Asta’s own child by her husband Rasmus.

But in that case why had she torn out the five pages?

I looked up at the bookshelves that faced me, wondering if I could put the paperbacks that were on them elsewhere and use the resulting space for the diaries, when I noticed among them the green spine that denotes Penguin crime. There was only one. I sensed before I took it down what it would be.

This copy was in better condition than the one Cary had given me. The corners weren’t dog-eared and a faint gloss still remained on the faces, shadowy or clear, that composed the collage: Madeleine Smith, Hawley Harvey Crippen, Oscar Slater, Dr Lamson, Buck Ruxton and Alfred Eighteen Roper. Swanny and Torben always wrote their names and the date on the flyleaf of every book they owned. It’s an old-fashioned habit and no one seems to do it any more. I looked inside the Penguin with the green spine and there on the top of the title page Asta had written: A. B. Westerby, July 1966.

The only crime books Swanny had were two Agatha Christies in paperback and
The House of the Arrow
by A. E. W. Mason. Or, rather, the only ones Torben had had, for it was his name written inside them. So Swanny must have found this copy among Asta’s things, glanced through it and, finding Navarino Road mentioned and the name of Roper, begun to read. This was a name she had previously read in Asta’s diary. Soon she came upon the missing Edith.

And yet I was sure the name Roper occurred only once in the diary. I’d read that first volume of diaries three times, once the translation in manuscript, once the proof, then the finished copy, yet when Cary had mentioned the name it had meant nothing. Then it came to me. The passages which alerted Swanny must have been in the missing pages. Cary was right. Somewhere in there Swanny had found a great deal more about Alfred and Lizzie Roper, an account of some aspect of their lives written by her mother in August 1905, and it had to be something pertinent to her.

I was looking through the green paperback, hoping to find in the piece on Roper a page turned down or better still a pencil marking or even an underlining, when the doorbell rang. Paul Sellway. I expected a big fair man, a man with one of those smooth Danish faces, mild blue eyes and the long upper lip that also seems characteristic. Although I’d never seen Hansine I’d seen photographs, notably the one in which she wears an apron and frilly cap, and Swanny had told me Joan Sellway was a tall blonde woman. I expected him to look like my impressions, mostly imaginary, of Hansine and her daughter.

He was thin and dark. If I’d been asked to identify his nationality I’d have said he was Irish. He had the Irishman’s upturned mouth and wild eye and sharp jaw and copious black curly hair.

‘I’m a bit early,’ he said. ‘I’ve been getting excited about the prospect of seeing the diaries.’

Even so, it seemed a bit brusque to take him straight into the study. ‘Come and have a drink,’ I said.

For the first time in my life I was experiencing the pleasure of being proud of my own house. For it
was
my home, something that hadn’t quite sunk in when I brought Cary there, or perhaps I’d been distracted by the variety of emotions the sight of her aroused. When Paul Sellway followed me into the drawing room I felt a small childish unexpected glow of pride. The only colour in Swanny’s house was in the ornaments and the pictures. Otherwise all was pallor or darkness with everywhere the glint of gold and the shine of silver. I saw him look at the Larsson, move closer to study it.

‘There’s one very like it in the Stockholm art museum,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the same one at first but it’s not. The other hasn’t got the dog and it’s got a second birch tree.’

I didn’t tell him that Swanny’s couldn’t be the Stockholm painting because it was an original. Torben had been heard to say he wouldn’t have a reproduction on his walls. I’d thought it snobbish and élitist at the time and did so the more now.

I gave him a drink, said, ‘I thought while you’re here you might like to see some photographs too. There are lots of your grandmother.’

‘In maid’s uniform?’

I was a little taken aback. ‘One is. But I truly think it was more like fancy dress. I mean,
my
grandmother got your grandmother to wear it just to make a good picture.’

He burst out laughing. It was very hearty, infectious laughter. I couldn’t help joining in, then saying ridiculously, ‘What makes you laugh?’

‘I did my doctoral thesis on Strindberg, with particular attention to his autobiography that’s called
The Son of a Servant.
He was, you know, and it rankled. My mother wasn’t pleased at my choice of subject.’

I asked him why.

‘My grandmother was in service for a long time, at least twenty years, and she liked talking about it. After all, it was her whole youth. But my mother hated it, she was deeply ashamed of a mother who’d been a servant, and I’m afraid my grandmother played up to it. I mean, she teased her. I was very young but I can just remember that. My grandmother used to go on about having this lovely uniform and starching her caps and putting on a fresh apron to answer the door—all that sort of thing, you can imagine.’

That reminded me of Swanny’s visit to Joan Sellway, the denials, the cold response. I asked him how he remembered Hansine. Had he been fond of her? Was she the warm motherly creature I pictured and that the diaries seem to confirm?

‘I don’t think she was particularly,’ he said. ‘Hindsight tells me she didn’t like children. She lived with us and she and my mother sparred a lot. My grandmother seemed to take pleasure in rubbing my mother up the wrong way, and the reverse was true too. I much preferred my other grandmother. I think I sensed that she treated me more as a person in my own right, not a pawn to be used in grown-up’s games. I suppose, when you say that about her being warm and motherly, you’re thinking of her playing with Mogens and Knud?’

I was so surprised I came straight out with it. ‘You’ve read the diaries then?’

‘Of course. I thought you knew that.’

‘Most men when you ask them say, “No, but my wife has.” ’

‘I haven’t got a wife. I did once but I haven’t since the first volume of Asta’s diaries was published. Now, please, can we go and look at them?’

Paul took the diary in both hands and held it in a way that was both reverential and delighted. He was rather like a child clutching the Christmas present he’s long been waiting for. The stains puzzled him and the brown marks on the pages and he shook his head in wonder when I explained where Asta had hidden her books and where they’d been found.

I brought him a copy of
Asta
, a pristine first edition. He compared it with the original, confirmed of course that the missing five pages were missing in the printed book and in the translated manuscript, and said that if I wanted a closer and more accurate comparison that would take him a while.

He didn’t suppose I’d let him take the diary away with him? Just the notebook for 1905?

An hour earlier I’d have said that was the last thing I’d consider. Now I found myself saying of course he must, there was no other way, I knew the diary would be safe with him. A sensation of Swanny turning in her grave I chose to ignore.

‘Does the name Roper mean anything to you?’ I said.

‘Brides in the Bath,’ he said promptly. Then, doubting himself, ‘No, arsenic. A poisoner, anyway, a sort of Crippen character.’

I explained. Or I explained what Cary wanted if not quite what
I
wanted. Not that I was exactly sure then what that was. I gave him Asta’s
Famous Trials
paperback. After all, I had two copies now.

‘May I take the diaries that cover the next two years as well?’

In refusing, I knew very well that I was inviting him back to collect them when he had done with Volume One. And, looking at me with a smile, not a smile of resignation, I guessed he knew it too. It’s at this point that I should say he took me out to dinner. But it wasn’t like that, it was a recognition on both our parts that we were hungry, it was past the time at which we usually ate and that there are several restaurants at South End Green. I suppose it would be true to say he suggested it but in the way very old friends might suggest dining together.

‘Shall we go out and eat?’

‘I’ll get my coat,’ I said.

Much later that night I sat down to re-read the first part of
Asta
and I was surprised to find how much it dismayed me. All Asta’s digs at Hansine, her scornful comments, almost a subtext to her narrative, leapt out of the page and pinched me so that I winced. This was the first time I had given any thought as to how Hansine’s descendants might feel about Asta’s unkind remarks. What must Joan Sellway have felt when she saw her mother described as stupid, ‘like a farm animal’, ‘fat and red-faced’, greedy, lazy and less than fit company for her employer?

If Paul hadn’t told me he had already read the book, I thought how much worse I would be feeling, and I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to whoever might be listening that I’d asked him that clumsy question about his wife reading the diaries. Even so, he would soon come to Asta’s spiteful judgements in the original as well as in Margrethe Cooper’s translation. Somehow that seemed to me to compound the unpleasantness of it. I knew I’d hear from him again because he was a conscientious man but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sent all the papers back with a curt note.

I sat up a long time that night, browsing about in the diaries, looking for references to Roper, looking for clues to Swanny’s identity and finding only that Asta dwelt rather a longer time than she might have done if she’d had nothing to hide on Rasmus’s questions about the new baby and his remarks on that baby’s appearance. It disquieted me, though. I’ve said I’ve never been married and know nothing much about marriage, but just the same I was almost shocked by the idea of a relationship in which one party could keep such a secret as that from the other. These had been my grandparents, married to each other for more than fifty years, sharing a bed all that time, progenitors of many children. Thinking about it brought me close to the conclusion Swanny had herself perhaps reached towards the end of her life, that Asta had been telling the truth when she recanted and said she made up the story of the adoption.