Asta's Book (37 page)

So her other self was shown to me, to Sandra, to Mrs Elkins, and to the two nurses, Carol and Clare, and only to us. Perhaps we were all naturally discreet. For my part, I told no one of Swanny’s personality split. If the others talked, it never reached the press. As far as the rest of the world knew, Swanny Kjær continued to be the ‘remarkable’, ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’—and all the other adjectives newspapers use about an old person who isn’t bedridden and gaga—custodian of the diaries she had always been. When Jane Asher recorded
Asta
on audiotape, the picture of Swanny on the promotional pamphlet was the photograph beside the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, the last one she was ever to have taken.

At home, increasingly often, even her appearance was changed. She had always been fastidiously clean and sleek and groomed, taking a shower or a bath twice a day—to Asta’s derision—dressing with formal care, paying great attention to her hair and going to the hairdresser twice a week. Like my mother, she had devoted part of each day to the care of her clothes, and buying new ones was one of the pleasures of her life. Now, on the days when she became her other self, she refused to bath and resisted the attempts of Carol or Clare to get her to do so. She insisted on putting on an old tweed skirt and woollen jersey, though jumpers and skirts were the kind of clothes she had once condemned as sloppy dressing. Her hair was thick and short, the naturally tidy kind, so she untidied it by simply leaving it as it was when she got out of bed. She went bare-legged, her feet thrust into bedroom slippers, and succeeded in looking like the bag lady who pushed her box barrow up Heath Street.

Swanny had always had, as long as I had known her, a tiny red mark on her left cheekbone under the eye. It was a broken blood vessel, not a mole, but she began to turn it into one. I thought she had a dirty mark on her face and told her so but she only gave one of her mysterious smiles and next time I saw her the mark was bigger, a perfect circle about the size of a shirt button and put on with eyebrow pencil. It was always there after that, whether she was Swanny or the other one.

One day she asked me to buy her some knitting wool and a pair of needles. Asta, of course, had been a fine needle-woman and my mother was good at sewing. There had been a phase when she made all my clothes and her own. But although Asta mentions buying wool to make baby clothes in the early part of the first diary, she must have stopped knitting when she became more prosperous and I’d never seen Swanny with any kind of needle in her hand.

‘I didn’t know you could knit,’ I said.

‘I’ve had to,’ she said in Mrs Elkins’ voice. ‘There was a time when I made everythink I wore—that is, in the woollies line.’

‘What colour would you like? And come to that what weight? It does come in weights, doesn’t it?’

‘Lilac or pink, a nice pastel shade. And it’d better be double-knit with the needles number eight. It’ll keep me busy when I’m watching the telly in the evenings. I’ve never cared to sit about idle.’

‘I’ll get you some pink or mauve wool this afternoon,’ I said, ‘so that you can make a start tonight.’

Humour the mad and go along with everything they say, used to be advice given to those having to do with them. Yet advocating it is unnecessary, for this is our natural, or at any rate our easiest, response. It is the normal reaction. To challenge them, which is what Daniel used sometimes to do as a part of therapy, is such a frightening thing that we baulk at it and fall back on placebos and smiling acquiescence. Better humour the madwoman than face the unknown but potentially terrifying results of saying: ‘Why do you talk like that, act like that, dress like that? Who is this person you’ve become? Where is yourself?’

I’d lived with a psychotherapist and knew his methods. I knew what he would advise, yet I did otherwise. I didn’t even ask her who she thought she was. She had become a working-class grandmother, knitting baby clothes, and I behaved as if this were entirely normal, just what I expected, and even pretended to admire the tangled mess she made as the pink wool was transformed into a cat’s-cradle of infinite complexity suspended from needles awkwardly gripped in her arthritic hands.

There were, of course, the other days, the days when she was Swanny Kjær again. The knitting was put away—where, I wonder, and with what thoughts and resolutions?—the clothes were back to normal, her hair was brushed and her face discreetly painted, though the mole was painted on as well. Like this, speaking like a Hampstead lady, with a tweed suit on and stockings and high-heeled shoes, she took a taxi down to Covent Garden or Kensington to sign books in a bookshop or have lunch with her agent. Nor did Sandra have to cancel when the day came for her to go out live on
Woman’s Hour.

But the other one was taking over. The other one, the nameless unspecified separate persona, was slowly absorbing the Swanny I had known. The occasions when she was herself became fewer and fewer. I don’t mean to give the impression, when I say I and all of us humoured her, that we took no action. Her doctor had kept a watchful eye on Swanny from the start of all this. Since she went to him privately, in other words she paid him, he visited every week.

‘I could ask the psychiatrist to come to see her,’ he said to me. ‘That would mean explaining to her who and what he is and why he’s coming. In other words, it’s bringing out into the open that we think she’s mentally disturbed.’

He too belonged to the humouring school, it seemed.

‘She seems happy enough,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure of that but I was a coward too. I didn’t say to him that sometimes, when she was herself and when she was the other, I saw in her face a blank waste of despair.

‘At her age do we want to cause upheavals in her equilibrium? She’s a very old lady.’ I didn’t say that her mother, at Swanny’s age, had been walking for miles across Hampstead Heath, going to parties, selling her antique clothes, reading Dickens and writing her diary. What was the use? People are different. ‘It may be the best thing,’ he said, ‘for me to give her something to calm her down.’

So Swanny went on the doctor’s tranquillizers, though she had never been anything but tranquil. If I had to find one single adjective that most exemplified her that’s what it would be. She was tranquil. She always had been and I suspect it was her reposefulness and quiescence, her gentle calm, which originally attracted Torben as much as her Norse goddess looks. To say that someone is tranquil doesn’t, after all, imply contentment, only perhaps a peaceful acceptance of or yielding to an unhappy fate.

I have said I never asked her who she was when she wasn’t herself. As far as I know, no one asked her. The rest, Sandra and Mrs Elkins and the nurses, tended to shun her when the other took over from Swanny Kjær, that is they spoke to her when they had to, they performed their duties, but it was obvious they were growing afraid. They were simply afraid, as people are with the mad, of what she would do.

Probably, they didn’t want to know who it was she became. All of us fear the manifestations of madness because its vagaries and its revelations show us what may lurk under the surface of our own minds. I was sometimes as frightened as they but I did want to know. I nearly asked. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask and I felt on these occasions much, I’m sure, as Swanny must have felt when she screwed herself up to ask Asta for the truth. But each time I drew back. And perhaps she would never have told me but have taken refuge in cunning and invented a name and an identity for the old knitting woman in the bedroom slippers.

My understanding of who this woman was came to me six months after Swanny was dead. She was Edith Roper. Swanny thought she was Edith Roper.

I re-read the Donald Mockridge coda Swanny had read. Edith had been born in May 1904. Edith was a blonde, blue-eyed child, tall for her age. She had a mole on her left cheek. By some twisted reasoning Swanny must have worked it out that if Edith hadn’t been adopted by Asta, if she had grown up in the milieu from which she had come, at eighty-one she would very probably have been like Mrs Elkins’ own mother, living in Walthamstow, many times a great-grandmother, a television-watching knitter and member of the local Senior Citizens’ club.

So she became her. Because, perhaps, she or her unconscious thought it the proper thing, the right thing. Destiny had been cheated and it was for her to put things right. Or, believing herself to be Edith Roper, she
wanted
to be her, she had found an identity at last, and if it wasn’t the one she would have chosen, it was all she was going to get.

Her imagination, the limited imagination of a sheltered woman whose contact with the working class had been as an employer of domestic help, made her place Edith among the unwashed. Her reaction to the occasional sight of the Heath Street bag woman was to put Edith’s bare feet into slippers and leave Edith’s hair uncombed. The sound of Mrs Elkins’ speech patterns her unconscious mimicked for Edith’s utterances.

‘Yet she was wrong,’ Paul said.

‘Oh, yes, she was wrong. Asta adopted a baby around the 28th of July, 1905. At that time Edith was fourteen months old and walking.’

‘And, as I remember it, she was writing about nursing the baby three months later. Besides, she could hardly have passed off an eighteen-month-old child, as Edith would then have been, as a new baby to Rasmus when he came home in November.’

‘How well you know the diary,’ I said.

‘I’ve just gone through it. I may not be such a wizard in a week’s time. Your aunt very obviously wanted to believe, she wanted an identity, and she latched on to the one that was a possibility. Perhaps it was the only possibility she could see. She may have found others in the past but none of them fitted as closely as this did.’

‘It really isn’t possible, is it?’

‘That she was Edith? Not unless Asta falsified all the entries about her daughter Swanhild for the next three or four years, not unless she lied about what she said to Rasmus and he said to her, not unless she persuaded Rasmus to take on a child he would certainly have seen as the daughter of a murderer and a woman who was more or less a prostitute. I think we can discount all that. Besides, what are we saying? That Asta, who certainly did give birth on or around July 28th, was walking about the streets on that same day, ready to pick up and carry home someone else’s wandering infant?’

‘I wonder what happened. I mean, was her own child born dead? Or did it die soon after birth? Was it another boy or a girl at last? We’ll never know, will we?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘It’s going to be in those five missing pages from the first diary. Your aunt tore them out but she may not have thrown them away.’

‘You mean I should search the house?’

‘That depends on how much you want to know.’

I said I supposed I did want to know. Yet if I did come to know I’d never be able to tell Swanny who was dead, who had died the victim of a gross delusion, believing herself to have been someone she could not by the wildest stretch of facts have ever been. Swanny hadn’t looked like the Westerbys, but plenty of people look different from the rest of their family members. Asta had told Swanny she was adopted but there had never been proof. They had all been born a century or many decades too soon for genetic fingerprinting.

She was Asta’s own daughter and Asta had invented the story. Torben had been right all along. Asta had written and sent the anonymous letter herself. Hadn’t it been posted in Hampstead? Hadn’t she burnt it? Yes, in spite of her protestations of disgust, Asta wrote it.

‘I’m afraid I don’t believe that,’ Paul said.

‘Why “afraid”?’

‘Just a figure of speech.’

With that I had to be content but I wasn’t. Not altogether. He has such an open face, as those with Irish looks do have, eyes that are mirrors of the soul and a mobile mouth. His expression had become rather blank and fixed, a look that lifted gradually while I talked, wondering and speculating as one does when a complex revelation has been made, of Swanny’s references to her brother’s death at Argonne where Edith’s own brother had died and of Swanny’s insistence on adding that year to her age.

It didn’t strike me particularly then that he didn’t want to talk any more about the anonymous letter. I supposed, quite wrongly as it happened, that he was growing bored with the whole subject and I changed it as soon as I could without obviousness.

Nor did any searching of the house take place. Instead we went back to his house in Hackney which was so near to where Asta had once lived. He wanted to show it to me and nothing more was said that night about the diaries or Swanny’s strange misapprehension.

21

January 17th, 1920

DET ER MÆRKELIGT
, men sidste Gang Sergeanten kom paa Besøg, var det igen Hansines Frieftermiddag. Jeg kan sværge paa, at jeg ikke arrangerede det med Vilje, men det var bare helt tilfældigt.

It’s strange but last time the Sergeant came to see me it was again Hansine’s afternoon off. I swear I didn’t arrange it that way, it just happened. Of course, I’m happier with her out of the way when he calls. I don’t want her flapping her apron and saying how handsome he is or even making snide remarks, and now she’s left there’s no risk of that.

She has gone to stay with Cropper’s mother and father until the wedding next month. I don’t envy her, I must say. Unless she’s been exaggerating, old Mrs Cropper never misses a chance to cast up to her the fact that she’s a foreigner, criticizes her English and has found out she’s
a whole six months older
than Cropper. An awful crime, this one. What bosh it all is!

Poor Hansine’s biggest dread is that her future mother-in-law will find out she can’t read and write. I don’t know how she thinks she’s going to keep that dark.

April 12th, 1920

Hansine is married. Rasmus and I were invited to the wedding but of course we didn’t go. I gave the happy couple a Royal Copenhagen vase which I’ve had for years, given me originally by Onkel Holger’s sister for my own wedding. I never liked it and it’s been shut up in a cupboard for years, so closely hidden away that I was sure Hansine had never seen it before. However, from the look she gave me when I presented it to her, I’m not so sure. I hope she won’t drop it like she has so many of my nicest pieces.