Asta's Book (38 page)

The new maid who takes over from her is called Elsie. Emily and Elsie, how confusing! Mrs Cropper as she now is will be living with her husband in Leytonstone. One of these fine days, if I’m invited, I shall get the Sergeant to drive me over to her house. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps not. I’ll have more interesting places to go to.

Who would have thought Rasmus would agree to the Sergeant driving me about? (I must make a note here to remember to call him Harry.) The fact is I was sure he would fly into one of his rages, as he does more and more these days. I imagined him saying, ‘If
my
wife goes out in
my
motor
I
am going to drive her.’ But all he said was that in that case it would have to be the Mercedes, which I know is the motor he’s least fond of.

Harry was very pleased. He said he’d take me out every Saturday if I liked and in the evenings in the week when his work is done. His job is with the Metropolitan Water Board, though he started life as a coachman. We’d best stick to Saturdays for the time being, I said. What about your wife and your daughters? Won’t they want you to be with them? He only smiled and said he’d never neglect his family, he knew better than that, and we went out for our first drive, up into Hertfordshire to see the country and some pretty villages.

I felt rather strange and awkward for a while. I thought he would take advantage, I’d been brought up to believe people of his class do take advantage if you let yourself relax with them, but he didn’t. He is always perfectly respectful. I had brought a picnic with me. We found a lovely place under some trees down a quiet country lane. Harry brought the picnic basket out to me and spread the cloth on the grass, he laid a blanket down for me and put the cushions just so, but I could see he wasn’t going to sit down with me and share it, he was going off for a walk.

Of course I wasn’t going to have that. I made him sit down opposite me and though he was awkward at first he soon got over that. It was a strange feeling, the sense I had that at last, at my advanced age, I’d found someone I could talk to. I felt I had to grasp at it before it flew away and my chance of it was gone for ever.

He asked me about Denmark and how it had felt to be an exile and then I saw that the trees above us were beech trees. There came to me then such a yearning for my home and my country that it was like a sharp pain in my heart. I believe he could tell but instead of changing the subject he got me talking on and on about Denmark and this free talking and remembering helped me so that I felt stronger and I could laugh again.

He knows a lot. I was going to write ‘for a working man’ but that wouldn’t be right. He knows a lot for
any
man. A lot of history, for one thing. He told me which members of the English royal family had married Danish princesses, for instance. It wasn’t possible for me to confirm this but I looked it up in an encyclopedia when I got home and he was right. Then he is very knowledgeable about the countryside and talked about an English painter I’d never heard of, not knowing the English had any painters. This one was called John Constable who painted woods and fields in Suffolk and Essex but lived in Hampstead and is buried in the churchyard there. I said we might go there and look at his grave.

Next week we are going to take the children with us. Harry is very fond of Swanny, is always saying how lovely and charming she is. In one way I like this, I love to see Swanny admired as she deserves, but in another it makes me uncomfortable. I think I’m a bit jealous—jealous of my own daughter!

July 29th, 1920

Yesterday Swanny was fifteen. She didn’t want a party, she says none of the girls at school is close enough to her for her to want to invite friends to her home. She has no real friends. Like me, she doesn’t make friends easily. Parents are always saying of their child, ‘Where does so-and-so get that from? Not from me or her father. There’s none of that in our family,’ as if everything about you must be inherited. I don’t think it happens quite like that, I think children copy their parents and behave the way they’ve seen them behave, though it’s not a view that’s fashionable.

Swanny said she might have felt differently about having a party if Mogens had been alive, if Mogens could have been there. I might have said to her that he’d be twenty-two if he’d lived and probably not even living at home with us, but I didn’t. I said that though we’d always be sad about Mogens dying, life had to go on and we’d have to learn to remember him without being unhappy. It didn’t have much effect. I don’t want her young life spoiled by mooning and brooding on a dead brother.

I am reading
Bleak House
for the third time.

September 4th, 1920

We are off to Denmark, Rasmus and I. It’s strange, I’ve been on holiday to Paris and to Vienna but I’ve never been back to my own country and I’m very excited. We’ll have to spend a day or two with his horrible sister in Aarhus but the rest of the time will be with Ejnar and Benedicte in Copenhagen. From what I’ve seen of her, which isn’t much, just when they stayed a night with us two years ago, I rather like Benedicte. On the face of it, she didn’t seem bitter and mean-spirited and prudish and cold and snobbish and high-and-mighty like the rest of them. The Danes are supposed to be merry folk, drinking beer and laughing and having a jolly time, but I can’t say I’ve seen much sign of it.

The girls will stay with Mrs Housman. It wouldn’t be right to keep them away from school. I should have written, the girls will stay with Mrs Housman if Rasmus hasn’t quarrelled with her husband by that time. He goes about telling everyone he has swindled him and I just hope it won’t reach Mr Housman’s ears before the 12th when we go away.

I’ve bought two new dresses for the trip, a Chanel two-piece in blue-and-black charmeuse and a blue and violet tea-gown with lilac and black velvet scarf sleeves. Everything is blue and black this year and luckily those colours look good on me. I have a new pair of shoes in black patent with Louis heels and a double instep strap, a style I like better than any other. Both dresses are very short. I never thought the day would come when I would wear skirts that show eight inches of leg.

This morning when Emily went downstairs she found Bjørn lying dead and cold in the scullory. Poor old dog, he had a good life and a long one for his breed. Rasmus actually wept when I told him, he who hardly ever shows feeling for anyone—except, of course, for Mogens—cried real big wet tears for a dog.

‘No one would call you a Great Dane, that’s for sure,’ I said to him.

March 20th, 1921

Harry has told me a surprising thing. We had intended to go for a drive to Kew Gardens but it was pouring with rain, so instead we went to a theatre matinée. It wasn’t a good play and I remember scarcely anything of it these few days later. The remarkable thing was that I was able to persuade Harry to take a ticket for himself and sit with me. We found we had exactly the same feelings about this terrible play, wanting to laugh at the sentimental parts and yawn at the long speeches. Most plays seem to be about the war or about what happened afterwards, bereaved parents and crippled men and girls left to be old maids because there are no young men to marry them.

I did a bit more persuading and got Harry to come and have tea with me in a tea-shop. We talked about Swanny and the girl in the play whose fiancé had been killed and I opened my heart and said, wouldn’t it be terrible if there was no suitable young man to marry Swanny. The fact is, you don’t see many young men, just middle-aged ones and little boys. The fine young men have all been killed.

I look back to the top of this page and see I wrote that Harry told me a surprising thing. I seem to be a long time getting round to what he did say. We’d got on to the subject of the English hating foreigners and he said that we were lucky having a name which sounded English even though it was Danish. Harry said he’d had a German name, 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. I thought that was clever of him and I said so, remembering Mr and Mrs Cline, who hadn’t changed their name enough and still had trouble.

Calling himself Duke was very clever. He said he didn’t know any German but he could read, had looked up his name in a German dictionary and found it meant Duke. This was just before he met his wife and when he began courting her he’d changed his name by deed poll.

Talking of people who can or can’t read, Hansine has had a baby girl. She is to be called Joan. So much for not wanting children!

Swanny surprised me by asking to see the new baby, so Harry is to drive us over there. We are good friends, Harry and I, and each week that passes the class barrier between us seems to grow a little thinner and weaker. The barrier of sex is another matter. I feel very strongly that even though we strictly speaking are mistress and servant—still, we pay him nothing—he is a man and a strikingly handsome one while I am a woman who, I think I can say, am more aware than most women of the nuances and
frissons
of sexual tension. If I am frank, I’ll say I am aware of love all around me, in other people and between other people, I know I have never had it and, yes, I long for it. Even at my advanced age, I long for love.

Well, ungratified, it will soon pass, I suppose. I shall be forty-one this summer but have not a single grey hair. This morning I examined my head very closely, noting that every hair remains the same sandy colour. Poor Rasmus’s beard is quite grey, though the hair on his head is still brown.

June 23rd, 1923

Rasmus and I got back from Paris last night. I never write my diary when I’m away on holiday and I miss it. Holidays are strange things. You are supposed to have a change and a rest but what do you
do?
If you are with someone you can’t talk to because you aren’t interested in the same things the days are very long and pass very slowly. We went to the Louvre and up the Eiffel Tower, we went to Versailles and promenaded in the Champs-Elysées, but all Rasmus cares about is motor cars.

There are, of course, plenty of these in Paris and practically each one he sees has him craning his neck and staring and pointing out to me all sorts of things about it I don’t understand and don’t want to. Oddly, the only thing we seem to enjoy doing together is shopping for clothes for me. I will say for him, he doesn’t mind how much money he spends.

Paris has decreed that the chemise is gone and the straight silhouette is in. The waist has gone right down to the hips and belts have disappeared. We went to Patou to get me a straight pleated dress in black and white with a cape and to Chanel for a printed foulard costume. A lot of fashion is based on Indo-Chinese national costume, but I don’t like it, I don’t want to look like a Cambodian peasant. I bought a dress for Swanny in crêpe de Chine with floating panels, a very pale shade of eau-de-nil, which Rasmus thought was for me. He must have some strange ideas if he thinks I’d wear something down to my ankles!

I missed my diary and I also—oh, how much more!—missed Harry. All the time I was out with Rasmus I kept thinking how different it would be if Harry were my companion, how we would talk and laugh and share things. I thought how we would want to see the same things, for we are both fond of paintings, especially paintings of people, and how we would enjoy the wonderful food. We both like large delicious meals that go on and on. Rasmus eats to live.

Still, I shall see Harry tomorrow and I shall ask his advice. Rasmus is the proper person to ask but I know he’ll only say to suit myself, he won’t care. A letter was awaiting me from Benedicte, asking if I would spare Swanny to go and stay with them. She isn’t talking about weeks but months and suggests six months. I’m not sure I can bear to be parted from her for so long but I shall ask Harry what he thinks.

April 12th, 1924

Rasmus is jubilant. Today he heard that he has been granted something called the Cadillac concession for the British Isles. This means apparently that he and only he can sell Cadillac motors in this country. Well, he and Mr Cline that he’s gone into partnership with can sell them. Rasmus has fallen out thoroughly with Mr Housman who he says has swindled him out of thousands.

They intend to open a large showroom in the King’s Road at Chelsea. The next thing I suppose will be that I’ll be asked to leave Padanaram and move to Cheyne Walk or some such place, which I shall certainly refuse to do. I’ve learned to stick up for myself a bit more since those days before the war when he could announce we were moving in a month’s time and I had to make the best of it.

One instance of how I’ve asserted myself happened yesterday when he informed me of the summer holidays we’d be taking. Two weeks at Bognor Regis, wherever that may be, with the girls and two weeks in Brussels for us. I don’t want to go to Brussels, whatever would I do there for a whole fortnight alone with him? We had a terrible quarrel, one of our worst, and of course Marie had to overhear it and start crying.

I could have killed Rasmus. He sat her on his knee and hugged her—and her a great girl of thirteen—and said that if he couldn’t stand life with Mor any longer would she come and live with him and be his little housekeeper. I screamed at him not to talk like that to the children. The worst was when Marie said if that happened would Mor go and be married to Uncle Harry.

She is much too old to say things of that sort. You could understand it if she were six. Rasmus had her on his lap and her cheek pressed against his beard and I could see him smirking over the top of her head.

‘So Mor’s going to marry the chauffeur, is she?’ he said, and then, to me, ‘You see what you’ve done, going about alone with that man.’

He doesn’t mean it, though. He knows I wouldn’t misbehave myself. I wish I could, I want to, but it’s no use. Perhaps Harry wants to and feels the same, that it’s no use, that we aren’t those sorts of people. He kisses my hand sometimes, that’s all. But I won’t go away alone with Rasmus any more, not to be abroad somewhere thinking of Harry all day long and how if the world was ordered differently it might be him walking by my side.