Asta's Book (39 page)

Mrs Duke, Harry’s wife, has had another child, another girl. That makes four girls they have. When he told me I felt myself grow pale, I felt a shiver as the colour was drawn out of my face, but I nodded and smiled and said congratulations and how nice. The truth is I am jealous, I am jealous of the woman who has Harry’s children. I would like Harry’s child myself but to write that down makes me faint and sick with longing.

June 2nd, 1924

Swanny has gone to Denmark. She left this morning on the boat in the care of Mrs Bisgaard. Dorte Bisgaard is going to be married to some very rich aristocratic Danish boy, so of course the wedding can’t take place from the Bisgaards’ common ordinary house in West Heath Road. What nonsense it all is! Still, I’m glad to let Swanny go in the keeping of a thoroughly trustworthy person.

This will be Swanny’s first time as a bridesmaid. There are to be six of them, all dressed in duck-egg-blue silk jersey with overskirts of turquoise satin. I had to persuade Swanny to agree, she insisted she would be so much taller than the other girls she would look ridiculous. Of course, she never could, but she is so modest,
too
modest.

Mrs Bisgaard will take her straight to Ejnar and Benedicte and she will leave for the wedding from there. I don’t want her staying in different houses, I want to know where she is. The fact is, I wish it were she getting married to a rich handsome man who would look after her.

This house feels dead without her, all the rooms lifeless and stale. But I’m alive all right. I’m a live thing in a dead room.

March 16th, 1925

We are all recovering from Knud’s wedding. This was Swanny’s second time as a bridesmaid and I don’t want there to be a third. Superstition is very foolish and I’m not superstitious but just the same I can’t help thinking of those words, Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Maureen threw her bouquet for Swanny to catch, a custom I’ve never come across before but which apparently means that the girl who catches it will be the next to marry. Of course she is not yet twenty and she has her admirers. That young man who was so keen on her in Denmark, the one she met at the party after Dorte’s wedding, bombards her with letters. He’s a Dane and very suitable but the one big drawback is he wants her to go to some place in South America with him. They are to marry and set sail immediately for Santiago or Asunción, I forget which. Swanny sensibly says to wait and see. She writes back but not very often and not at great length.

April 16th, 1927

I am a grandmother. I don’t feel or look any different and I certainly don’t feel anything for the baby. We went to see him and his mother this morning. He is exactly like Maureen, a pudgy-faced plain child, but Knud is no beauty either. They are going to call him John Kenneth.

The men went downstairs to celebrate by drinking, what Knud calls ‘wetting the baby’s head’, and the moment they were gone Maureen began telling me every detail of the birth, how terrible it was and how long it went on. I cut her short. I said there was nothing new in that, we all had babies—except those unfortunate ‘surplus’ women, of course, whose fiancés died in the war—and we all went through much the same. I reminded her I’d had five, not to mention the two I’d lost by miscarriage, and she couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.

The awful flat they live in must be her choice. But perhaps not. Knud has nothing in common with me, nor his father for that matter. The funny thing is that he is more English than the English and it’s a well-known fact they all love to live in houses while Europeans prefer apartments. Still, people aren’t consistent, I ought to know that.

Now the evenings are light Harry has begun taking me out again after dinner. There is something wrong with the Mercedes, so Rasmus said we could take the Cadillac. I don’t sit in the back any more but up in the front next to Harry. It’s odd how this began. I used to start in the back and then, once we’d stopped to look at something or go for a walk somewhere, I’d get back into the front seat. But the day before yesterday I was about to get into the back when I realized I was only doing this for fear of the neighbours seeing and talking. Well, I was ashamed of myself. When have I ever cared what people thought? So I shook my head and Harry seemed to know at once, to read my thoughts as he often does, and immediately he opened the passenger door for me. We have never done anything wrong and never will. Evil to him who evil thinks, is what I say.

He laughed when I said I didn’t much care for being a grandmother and surprised me by telling me his eldest wants to get married, so it may not be long before he catches up with me. She is only sixteen, born in 1911 and born a bit sooner than she should have been, I think. For some reason I like the idea of our being grandparents together.

We went to see Somerset Maugham’s
The Letter
at the Playhouse. Gladys Cooper is in it and I always like her, so beautiful, as actresses should be, but a silly story about a woman who shot a man who was trying to rape her. Only he was really her lover and she killed him because she found out he had a Chinese mistress.

Afterwards, though it was late and dark, we drove to Hampstead and walked about on the Heath. These days our drives get shorter and our walks or expeditions or meals together or visits to theatres and concerts get longer. I know what has happened and he knows, though we never say. He is courting me and I am courting him but with no possibility of kisses or even an arm round a waist, no eventual coming together, nothing beyond what we have, the meeting of eyes across a table, a shared burst of laughter, and my hand tightly held in his.

November 2nd, 1929

Swanny started her job today, very much against my wishes. But I have set down my feelings exhaustively and mean to say very little more about it. Torben Kjær would marry her tomorrow if she would have him. Then there is that young man who is some sort of cousin of Maureen’s. He’s mad about her, he is always on the telephone. If she prefers walking to Hampstead every morning to take an old lady’s dog out and read trashy novels to her, I suppose she must do it. She is grown up. Rasmus, of course, doesn’t care what she does except that he is rather pleased not to have to pay for her clothes any more. The pitiful amount she earns will just about cover that.

Looking back, I see I have forgotten to set down that Knud and Maureen have another child. A boy called Charles was born last Monday. And Harry’s eldest is expecting a baby. She’s the same age as I was when I had Mogens but, perhaps more to the point, the same age as Marie and I see Marie as a child still.

The New York market crash will affect Rasmus’s business, he says. I don’t understand how but I suppose he knows. All sorts of dire things are threatened, the loss of this concession of his, the possibility of our moving out of this house to somewhere smaller. He told me this evening that Mr Cline had swindled him out of thousands.

I am going to write it once and never again. I will write it and never even read it again—but when do I re-read this diary?

I am in love with Harry. I shall be fifty next year and I am in love for the first time. What will become of us, he and I? The sad thing is that nothing will. We shall go on just the same.

22

IF THIS WERE
my story I should chronicle in some detail the progress of my love. Our conversations would be recorded, but those concerned with
Asta
left out. I would note our first kiss and our first love-making. Instead, a précis of all that must suffice. It will have to be enough to say that I soon discovered, if I didn’t know it already, how wrong I’d been to tell Cary I was too old to have a lover and how foolish to tell myself that my capacity for love had been burnt out in the years with Daniel.

Cary herself I realized I must no longer neglect. It was two weeks since I had slept at my flat, for I had been dividing my time between Willow Road and Paul’s house in Hackney, but I’d gone back there several times to retrieve messages from the answering machine. Cary’s voice issued from it every time, on increasing levels of hysteria. She sounded extremely relieved when at last I called her back.

‘Oh, it’s wonderful to be actually speaking to you and not that bloody machine! I kept thinking I must have done something, I mean something
more
than what I’ve done, if you see what I mean. Listen, will you come with me to see Roper’s house?’

A strange thing had happened. I found that I no longer disliked her. She came to Willow Road on a Saturday morning, dressed up defiantly, as if it were important to prove to me more than to any other that her youthfulness had survived the years. And perhaps, in the light of what I’d said to her, it
was
important.

She had leggings on, the kind that were first designed for skiing, with an instep strap, a bright blue tunic tightly belted and a kind of tasselled poncho. But her expression was anxious. Her eyes were strained. I understood that when I said I’d forgiven her I was lying but I wouldn’t be lying now. We’d been friends once. Then into our late youth Daniel had intervened. It seemed to me that something had happened to wipe away those years and this was the old Cary and, come to that, the old me, in a way made young again as she would wish.

I kissed her. She drew back as if in recoil but then, as we walked into Swanny’s sitting room, she caught up with me and kissed my cheek. I must have been slow on the uptake that day, for it took me quite a long time to realize what had happened, why I liked her again and no longer resented her. We were in Hackney, Cary and I, exploring the Ropers’ house, walking through the rooms where Lizzie had lived and died, when, quite suddenly, I understood.

The question was whether, when the Roper film came to be made, the indoor scenes should be shot inside Devon Villa, Navarino Road, itself or in some other house chosen for the purpose. Devon Villa is still standing, as I’d been told Asta’s house in Lavender Grove still stands, though I’d never seen it. The obvious and best thing surely, as I said to Cary, would be to use the real house and consider it a piece of luck it hadn’t been demolished. Ah, she said, you say that because you don’t know television production companies like I do. It’s possible another place might be more suitable even though they didn’t live in it.

‘You mean you’re rearranging history?’

‘History could sometimes be tidier than it is,’ she said.

‘Think of all the unlikely things that happen. I want to eliminate unlikely things from this production.’

‘And Devon Villa’s unlikely?’

‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t seen it. But it’s a big house, I know that, and quite grand, though it had seen better days even when Maria Hyde first came there. Somehow it’s not quite the sort of place you’d expect people like that to have lived in.’

She was on her way over there. I said on an impulse that I’d go with her, though up till then I’d held out and said I wasn’t interested. But things had changed. My feelings for her had changed. I’d no objection to being with her and thought I might enjoy a day in her company. Now that I knew too whose identity Swanny had assumed in her last years, though there was no possibility of that identification being correct, I wanted to see the house where the child Edith had lived.

Cary, as the producer of the proposed serial, had an appointment with the owner of the ground floor and basement at Devon Villa and the owner of the flat on the first floor. The second and third floors were currently empty, the owners being away in Morocco, but the people downstairs had a key and would show us over the room where the bodies of Lizzie and Maria had been found.

She had been right about the house being grand. In Hampstead it would have been a stately residence but here the shabby neighbourhood detracted from its snob appeal. The whole terrace was more the kind of thing you see in Bayswater, Victorian classical, long sash windows, a flat stuccoed front, steps up to a front door inside a pillared porch. Devon Villa had been renamed Devon Court and there were three bells alongside the front door. I began to understand what Cary meant about unlikely things as soon as the woman who introduced herself as Brenda Curtis had let us into her flat. Once the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood were excluded and the front door closed, we might just as well have been inside one of the flat conversions next door in Willow Road.

The entrance hall had seemed promising, for the red marble floor mentioned by Ward-Carpenter was still there and unchanged, as were the carved balusters of the staircase. The chair rail that traversed the walls was surely a hundred years old and the lincrusta with its pattern of stylized leaves and flowers in relief. Now, of course, it was painted white, which Maria Hyde would probably have associated only with bathrooms, and the woodwork was white but for those mahogany banisters. But in here, where Brenda Curtis and her husband had the two, now three, rooms on the ground floor and the three more in the basement, we might have been in a house built last year, though built of course in a neo-Georgian way with arches and alcoves and recesses and, incongruously, an open-tread staircase descending to the basement.

‘I don’t know that I should care to live in the second-floor flat,’ she said as she took us down to where Florence Fisher had had her domain. ‘The Mannerings are away a lot, so perhaps it doesn’t worry them. And they’ve got quite an obsession about keeping things in period, so of course it’s clean up there but not really changed much. They sleep in that room, you know.’ She gave us a sidelong look. ‘The one where they found the bodies, I mean. I shouldn’t like that myself.’

We murmured, no, no indeed, we shouldn’t like it either.

‘When we came seven years ago nothing had been done down here. The place was just the way it must have been when Roper lived here. A very old woman had the basement, she’d lived here alone since she was thirty and she died here, and I don’t think she ever put a coat of paint on it. It didn’t look like it, anyhow. She kept the kitchen just the way it had been when Maria Hyde had it and when we came it was infested with black beetles. There was a room over there no bigger than a large cupboard where the poor little maid-of-all-work slept. The scullery was in this part, nearest to the outside, and would you believe it the old copper was still there, a dreadful old stone and plaster thing with a wooden lid. The estate agent said it was a collector’s piece like the kitchen range but we had it out. We altered everything and made it all spacious and airy, so you can’t really imagine how it was.’