Asta's Book (42 page)

He said in his earnest way, nodding a little, giving me that Westerby look, right into the eyes, ‘I shall find out who she was.’

‘Well, good luck,’ I said.

The next set of diaries, to be entitled
Peace and War
, were in print and I, along with a dozen other people, had the task of reading the proofs. It’s true what a lot of writers say, that you never really know what a work is like until you see it in print. A typed manuscript or even one that is a word processor print-out isn’t the same. Reading them for typographical errors and errors of fact and sense, I nevertheless aimed at reading them for pleasure too.

I knew, from having seen Margrethe Cooper’s translation in manuscript, that there was nothing here to give a clue to Swanny’s origins. But that was what I was on the lookout for. It hadn’t much concerned me while Swanny was alive but since her death, since Roper, since learning of the identity she’d assumed, my own need to know had grown and grown. It would never in the nature of things be as great as hers had been but it was strong enough for me. Cary longed to know who was Edith Roper and I to know who Swanny was. Practically the only thing we did know was that they were not each other.

I had never read Arthur Roper’s memoir and I gave the copy back to Cary. She suggested I might like to look at the piece Cora Green had written for the
Star
in the autumn of 1905.

I took a break from the diary proofs and read it. Of course, Cora Green hadn’t written it herself, it had been ‘ghosted’, though no doubt the facts, if facts they were, came from her. The ghost-writer had a flowery, precious and pompous style, and one that was old-fashioned even then. Lizzie Roper was dead and therefore couldn’t, in law, be libelled, so Mrs Green had gone to town on her lovers and her behaviour in their company. Maria Hyde was dead too and the fact that she and Cora Green had once been bosom friends conveniently forgotten.

Our street had been a respectable place until that notorious family, whose doings have lately formed the subject matter of so much scandal, took up their abode at Devon Villa. As one of those inclined to believe the best of people until proved otherwise, as a trusting and perhaps overly innocent woman, I confess I soon formed a friendship with my new neighbour, Mrs Maria Hyde.

Was that honourable title hers by right? Naturally, I did not inquire. She was known as ‘Mrs’ and so I called her. We were Mrs Hyde and Mrs Green until the intimacy of friendship dictated a change to Maria and Cora.

In those early days, the final decade of the last century, Maria Hyde had three lodgers, Mr Dzerjinski, Miss Cottrell and Mr Ironsmith. The little maid, not much more than a child but required to do most of the work of the house, was called Florence and she hailed from that wretched part of Hackney that is an acknowledged disgrace, the marshes of the River Lea.

‘Mr Dzerjinski, a foreigner as his name evinces, was more Mrs Hyde’s friend than her lodger. What their relationship truly was, what degree of intimacy of a possibly criminal kind they had reached, I cannot say. My tendency is to seek out the good in my fellow creatures, not the evil. However, even a saint or angel would have been hard-pressed to take a charitable view of the activities of Mrs Hyde’s daughter, the ill-fated Elizabeth or Lizzie, and the gentlemen (for want of a better word) who called at Devon Villa.

Mr George Ironsmith did not have to call. He was resident in the house. One day Mrs Hyde told me he was engaged to be married to her daughter and Miss Lizzie herself showed me a ring he had given her, a poor thing made of some base metal and paste or glass, I adjudged it, but nevertheless a pledge of his intent to make their association legal. The promise she had given him did not, however, hinder her from receiving the visits of others. Her betrothed was, after all, away from the house at business for the greater part of each day. Mrs Hyde herself introduced me to a Mr Middlemass, a gentleman of quite advanced years, as ‘Lizzie’s friend’.

We happened to meet one afternoon when she was showing him off the premises and I emerged quite by chance from my front door. Mr Middlemass was at least fifty years old and appeared prosperous with a fur collar to his overcoat and carrying a gold-topped cane. I saw him several times after that and it is my belief, albeit reluctantly entertained, that Miss Lizzie’s engagement was broken off as a result of his visits. Soon after this the luckless Mr Ironsmith moved out.

His place in the house was taken by a couple of irreproachable respectability, Mr and Mrs Upton. Mrs Upton and I were soon to recognize a mutuality of tastes and general philosophy of life and became firm friends. Indeed, our friendship was to outlast our sojourn in the neighbourhood and persists staunchly to this day. It was Mrs Upton who told me of the disgraceful condition into which the house was sinking, ‘livestock’ in the walls and even mattresses, black beetles in the kitchen regions as well as other unwelcome denizens of the insect kingdom.

There was a good deal more description here, written in the same unctuous style and high moral tone, of the conditions prevailing at Devon Villa. Cora Green also gave detailed descriptions of the personal appearance of all the occupants of the house. Miss Cottrell’s departure was referred to and Mrs Upton’s version given of the quarrel between her and Maria Hyde which led to her departure.

I remembered Cary saying how that other document of value in establishing the true state of affairs at Devon Villa, Beatrice Cottrell’s memoir, had disappeared. Like certain classical literature which perished, for example, in the great fire that consumed the library of Alexandria, its existence and nature were known only through quotations from it in other works. Cary had applied to the British Museum but in vain. I can’t say I was sorry. I read on.

I was deeply relieved when Miss Lizzie married the new lodger, Mr Roper. At first I had, unfortunately but perhaps with justification, seeing what had gone before, believed that Mr Roper was merely another string to her bow and the ‘friendship’ was not calculated to lead to any lasting relationship, sanctioned by church and law. But Miss Lizzie was intent this time upon matrimony and the other ‘gentlemen’ disappeared from Devon Villa.

Rumour in the neighbourhood of our street had it that Miss Lizzie, or Mrs Roper as she became, was in a certain condition at the time of her wedding and it is true that Mr Roper’s son and heir was born a mere six months after that interesting event.

How happy I would be to be able to say that Mrs Roper settled down after these events and became a loyal and devoted wife and mother! Unfortunately, that would be an untruth. Unnatural though it seems, she hated the fine healthy boy to whom she had given birth. To save him from a pitiful death from neglect, malnutrition and perhaps even wanton cruelty, Mr Roper was obliged to engage a nurse.

Florence had too heavy a load of domestic labour in that household to undertake in addition the care of a child. I had always pitied
her
, burdened as she was with an unfair load of menial tasks. She was often moved to confide in me and reveal the innermost secrets of her young heart. She had engaged herself to be married to another servant, a young man whose employers enjoyed the benefits of a handsome house in Canonbury. I was greatly relieved to hear it and relieved too that the man I had seen come to Devon Villa and be admitted through the basement area was Florence’s beau and not, as I had feared, yet another admirer of Mrs Roper’s.

These, however, were not few and far between. Mrs Roper had restrained herself while her son was an infant but it was not long before I saw Mr Middlemass arrive at the front door of Devon Villa in a cab. Another visitor at this time was a young man of the name of Cobb or Hobb. My astonishment may be imagined when I encountered Mrs Roper walking arm-in-arm with this person in London Fields. Mrs Roper had always been demonstrative in a way acceptable to no refined taste, but when her husband was the object of these transports only the most particular would have found fault. It was a different matter to see her putting her face close to that of Mr Cobb (or Hobb) and allowing him to place an arm round her waist.

No doubt, on this occasion she would have preferred
not
to see me but since we were approaching each other along the same path, there was no help for it. She put a brave face on things and introduced the young man to me as ‘Bert’, whom she called a friend of Mr Roper’s.

It was shortly after this that I saw another old friend of Mrs Roper’s in our street. This was none other than Mr Ironsmith, who had moved away some years before. I recognized him at once but he pretended not to know
me.
Where he had been in the meantime I cannot pretend to say. He was very gaudily dressed in a checked coat and wide-brimmed hat and was smoking a cigar and later, while coming down my front steps to speak to a tradesman, I was unable to help overhearing him in conversation with Mrs Roper on the doorstep of Devon Villa. If I had only heard him and not previously
seen
him I might have doubted who this was, for he spoke with a strong Colonial accent.

I came to the reluctant conclusion that Mrs Hyde herself played a part in these transactions. In short, at Devon Villa she was keeping a certain kind of house in which her own daughter was put to work. Whatever excuses may have been made, I have no doubt that it was a similar inference to my own which led to Miss Cottrell’s leaving. On this occasion a terrible altercation took place in the house next door, leading I believe to physical as well as verbal violence and culminating in poor Miss Cottrell’s furniture being put out into the street.

Mr Roper was in no doubt that he was not the father of the daughter born to his wife in May 1904. Whose was the paternity I cannot pretend to say. The shocking situation at Devon Villa became too much for me and I was fortunately able to discover alternative accommodation in Stoke Newington in the November of that year, whereupon I moved away. I heard no more of the Ropers and Mrs Hyde until I was confronted, through the pages of a newspaper, with the appalling revelations of Mrs Roper’s murder in the house next to the one in which I had lived for so long.

Asta’s diaries for the war years and those which preceded the war were full of herself and her feelings, more so than the ten notebooks for 1925–1934. There was less domesticity in them, less of interiors and furnishings, and more of independence, politics, international events and physical fear. A bomb had fallen nearly opposite ‘Number 98’. A family friend in Denmark had been shot by the Nazis for harbouring a Jew.

Middle age engrossed her, though she was funny and philosophical about it. She seems to have managed to ignore her husband totally for long hours or even days, though they shared that house and that bed, the one with the sphinxes, for the past six months occupied by me and often by Paul too. A great deal of time, more than ever, was passed in the company of Uncle Harry. Page after page was concerned with what Harry did and what Harry said and sometimes what Harry ate, drank and wore. She loved him, she said so, and there was no doubt he loved her, but the relationship never became sexual.

Asta would have considered herself, in her fifties and sixties, far too old. But she hadn’t always been too old, she hadn’t been too old when she met Harry in 1919. There was a class barrier, of course, erected by both of them. But neither their ages nor social differences seemed to have been enough to keep them from going for walks together, going to tea with each other, visiting the zoo, the parks, the British Museum, the cinema and theatre matinées together. The answer, of course, is that there was a moral prohibition, a taboo on both of them as married people. They were companions, they were friends, they could never be lovers.

But Harry, except in this aspect, didn’t much interest me. I wanted the solution to a mystery, not the chronology of a friendship. I was Swanny’s heir in more ways than one. Like her, I wanted to know, though being far less emotionally involved, was not liable to clutch at impossible straws. And as I thought about it, about how subtly and insidiously this desire to know had grown in me, I realized that it had permeated my attempts to talk to Paul about the diaries. In fact, I hadn’t tried to talk to him about the diaries in general but only and invariably in connection with Swanny’s origins. Whatever I had begun to say about them I had always returned to this one thing.

So it was this he didn’t want to talk about. Once I understood that I wanted to ring him up at work and apologize and tell him I’d been obtuse and ask him why. Why? But I never, or very seldom, have phoned him at work. He isn’t a man to hang about the Senior Common Room, is either teaching or holding a tutorial in his own room where he refuses to have a phone at all. We weren’t planning to see each other that evening. His mother was very ill, had had a severe heart attack a week before and lay in intensive care in a big heart hospital on the other side of London. Paul went to see her every day and that evening he had an appointment for a talk about her condition with the consultant in charge of the case.

Of course, in the absence of a chance of finding out for sure, I speculated. I laid the proofs aside and began asking myself why on earth Paul, who had seemed quite intrigued by the whole thing at first, should have set his face against discussing who Swanny might have been. One answer was that he knew. That was tantalizing but impossible. How could he have known and if, by some extraordinary chance he did, surely he would have wanted to tell me?

The last diaries, those written between 1955 and 1967, hadn’t yet been translated. That is, Margrethe Cooper hadn’t translated them. Paul had, or had been in the process of doing so when he took against the diaries and lost interest in them. I asked myself if he had found something that not only put him off further translating and but also stopped him telling me.

His grandmother, something about his grandmother. Inevitably I came back to Hansine. She had died in 1954 but Asta says very little about her death then. Perhaps she had saved her comments for the following year and Paul had discovered them. Or else his grandmother herself had told him. There had always been a strong possibility that Hansine knew, Hansine had been living with Asta in Lavender Grove and, unless something very strange was going on, must have known. But would she have passed this knowledge on to her grandson who was only a boy of eleven when she died?