Asta's Book (44 page)

I wish Swanny wouldn’t keep asking me. She refuses to believe me when I say I can’t remember. Some, of course, I remember, the fact of it, but not who and when and how. I resolved once never to write of it but I could laugh when I think how little that resolution matters now. I couldn’t write of it if I chose because I’ve forgotten nearly everything.

October 2nd, 1966

I get very tired in the evenings now, quite early in the evening, which never used to be the case, and I think the bits I write are getting shorter and shorter. What I’ve started doing instead is writing to Harry. We do see each other a couple of times a week but that’s not so easy now he is housebound and never drives and I’m dependent on Swanny for taxis.

Taxis are
extremely
expensive. I pay for mine out of the sales of all those old clothes. I’ve been back to the woman in St John’s Wood High Street and sold the blue-and-black Chanel two-piece and the pleated Patou dress. Did I buy them in Paris or in London? I can’t remember. She got quite excited, said she never expected to see anything so beautiful and in such good condition.

I’m going to stop now and write to Harry. I still write English very badly but he doesn’t mind. He calls them his love letters and he says I’m the only woman who has ever written him any.

‘What about that girl you were in love with when you were twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-four,’ he said. ‘I was twenty-four. It’s true I was in love and I meant to marry her but when it came to it she wouldn’t have me, she said something had happened to put her off men and marriage. But she said all that, she didn’t put it in a letter.’

‘Your wife must have written to you when you were in France in the first war,’ I said.

‘Oh, she did, and regularly,’ he said, ‘good letters full of home and the girls and how they all missed me, but they weren’t love letters. They weren’t like yours, Asta. Yours are great love letters like—well, like Robert Browning’s.’

‘Don’t you mean like
Mrs
Browning’s?’ I said. I said it to cover up how pleased I felt. No one else has ever told me I write well. I suppose no one else has had the chance.

We read those Browning letters together—well, not together. I got them from the library and then I passed them on to him.

September 2nd, 1967

It is all over. I feel that life is, but it won’t stop, it has to go on. I will never cease to be grateful to that kind good girl that she sent for me to be with her father when he was dying. Not when he died, not that, for he died after we had all gone, in the night, in his sleep, but while he lay there waiting for the end. He had pneumonia and the drugs they gave him couldn’t fight it any longer, it was too strong for them. One of the girls said he always had such bad bronchitis, winter after winter, because he’d been gassed in the Great War but I never heard that before. I didn’t say, though, I let her think it. All I could think of was how he coughed over those cigars.

He was eighty-five and that’s a good age. Long enough for anyone, you’d think, but not long enough for me. I’d have kept him alive until after I was dead myself, I’m selfish. He didn’t say any wonderful things to me as he lay there in the hospital, not about loving me for ever or any of that. He just held my hand and looked into my eyes but he was too weak to kiss my hand.

Well, he’s gone. Swanny had driven me to the hospital and she brought me home just as Torben was coming in. I didn’t say anything, I had dinner with them as usual and went to bed at the usual time. We got a phone call this morning to say he didn’t last the night. Swanny was good to me but I wouldn’t let her hug me, I was embarrassed, after all Harry wasn’t my husband, he was just my best friend. I went up to my room and stayed there all day and all night and thought about him and wrote this down. Not a very brilliant diary entry. Not some of my best prose! But at least I didn’t cry. I don’t.

September 9th, 1967

I am dead tired. I’ve been to Harry’s funeral. Swanny wanted to take me but I wouldn’t let her, I had to go there alone. She looked at my flowers as if it were a bunch of rhubarb I was carrying but if my memory’s as bad as can be at least I remember how Harry loved canna lilies. When we went for walks in parks he’d always stop by the flowerbeds with the cannas and say that was what he really called a flower.

There’s nothing else to say. I’ll never stop thinking about him but I’ve no wish to write it down. I’m too tired. This is the last entry I shall ever make in this diary. It’s pointless trying to keep any sort of record when you can’t remember what’s happened five minutes ago. I may burn all these notebooks, we’ll see. I burnt the ones I made when I was very young, I can remember that as if it were yesterday.

No, not as if it were yesterday, for that’s just what I always forget.

25

JOAN SELLWAY IS TOO
close to me, or would have been had she lived, for me to judge her. But Paul, who never said a word against her while she was alive, is no advocate of that adage about
de mortuis
and quite right too, I think. It’s wiser and kinder to say the good things about people while they’re alive and leave the condemnation for later. Not that there was much of that. But there was an explanation.

I’d said nothing to him of my thought processes on the afternoon of his mother’s death. It was he who spoke of it first.

‘Do you remember telling me about an anonymous letter your Aunt Swanny had? The letter that started all the trouble?’

As if I could forget. It had started trouble not only for Swanny. I could date the beginning of our own difficulties from my mention of that letter. I could see his face now as it had closed and his eyes grown dull, I could see him as he had withdrawn into himself and slowly become uncharacteristically cold.

‘My mother sent it.’

I looked at him. I looked at him in simple wonder.

‘I don’t know it absolutely, that is, I couldn’t prove it. But of course I do know it. As soon as you told me I knew and it was like a blow. I was horrified. I could hardly speak.’ He said miserably but with an attempt at shrugging it off, ‘You must have noticed. I know you noticed but I couldn’t do anything about that. I was too full of disgust and I was too frightened.’

‘How did you know?’

‘That she had sent it? I won’t say “written” it because she didn’t write them, she printed them in block capitals.’

‘She’d done others?’

‘Lots. No, that’s an exaggeration. Four or five before the one to your aunt. There was one to a woman whose husband was having an affair and another to someone who didn’t know her son was homosexual. One day she was in a rage about something and she told my father. It was her duty to enlighten people, she said. I expect something like that is always used as justification. My father left her when they were both middle-aged, they’d been married for twenty-five years. He gave me a long explanation of why and those letters came into it.’

‘She never told you herself?’

‘No, but I think you could say I never gave her the chance. Conversations with my mother were conducted on a very superficial level. I didn’t want to go below the surface. I suppose I was afraid to do that.’

I thought about it, we were both silent, eyeing one another. Then I asked him why he was filled with fear: why had he been afraid when I first mentioned the letter?

‘Of losing you.’

He said it with transparent simplicity.

‘Over that?’ I said.

‘People expect sons and daughters to be like their parents, they expect them to have the same faults. They blame people for their parents, though they shouldn’t. I’m not proud of being the son of an anonymous-letter writer. Can you honestly tell me that if I’d told you then it would have made no difference?’

The odd thing was that I couldn’t. I couldn’t have told him that. It would have made some difference, a small difference, though perhaps not so small. But did it make a difference now?

‘What a good psychologist you are,’ I said and I got up and went to him and put my arms round him. I kissed him and felt that all was well, all was well enough.

That letter had damaged the last twenty years of Swanny’s life. It had occupied her life with its repercussions and isolated her from all the good, enjoyable things that might have been hers. From its arrival could be dated the beginning of that fruitless quest and the ultimate madness and destruction of everything she had once been. It could be argued, of course, and this I put to Paul to make him feel better, that without the letter the diaries would very likely never have come to light, never been published to become bestsellers and make a fortune. Swanny would very likely not have bothered to read them, still less have had them professionally translated and set in train the publication process.

But I remembered her deathbed, at which I had been present. She had died at home, in the very early hours of one dark winter morning.

We were to move her to hospital that very day, the doctor had recommended, then urged, it. Since the big stroke that took away the use of her left side and drew down the corner of her mouth, she had withdrawn into herself, into a dull silence and immobility. The attentions of the physiotherapist and all the jollying-along that is part of post-thrombosis therapy she had rejected by her simple apathy. She refused to re-learn to walk or make attempts at recapturing the use of her arm. She lay in her bed by night and sat in a wheelchair during the hours of daylight. I came to see her most days and sometimes I stayed in the house over a weekend.

It was during one of these periods that the doctor’s recommendation to move her was made. One of the nurses had left and there was difficulty in finding a replacement. Swanny needed a day nurse and a night nurse and substitute day and night nurses when these women took their time off. A private room in a nursing home would make things easier for everyone, including, the doctor said, Swanny herself, who refused to be brought downstairs and was necessarily left alone for long dreary hours at a time.

The duration of the dual personality was over, the reign of Edith Roper was over. I didn’t know it then but I’m pretty sure now that Swanny had her first stroke on the day, or a little while after the day, she went to Hackney with Gordon and Aubrey, was shown the Roper rooms and told the story of the haunted stairs. It was too much for her, it was too much for her blood and her brain.

With that stroke Edith was sent away or else subsumed in the real Swanny, whoever and whatever that real woman was. She gave the impression of a great fear and a great horror just contained. As she lifted her head and attempted to compress her distorted lips, I would sometimes see in her eyes not that old tranquillity or newer despair, but straight simple fear. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I could say, no action I could take to change it.

On that morning the night nurse came and woke me and I went in to Swanny. She could speak, she had always been able to speak, though she seldom did. Her lips worked constantly as if she were trying to say something. Her right hand, the mobile one, fluttered along the edge of the sheet, plucking at it, sometimes rubbing it between finger and thumb. A sign that ‘they were going’, the nurse had whispered to me.

She was the first person I had seen die. The dead I had seen but I’d never been present when someone passed from life to death. I held her hand, the good hand that had feeling in it, and she squeezed my fingers very hard in her own. It must have been for about an hour that I held her hand and during that time the pressure on my fingers grew gradually weaker.

Clare, the night nurse, was due to go but she stayed on after the day nurse arrived. They waited in the room, sitting in silence. We all knew Swanny was dying. Her lips continued to work, as if she were chewing bread, but the motion began to grow more feeble. The hand that held mine slowly relaxed its hold. She spoke and behind me I heard one of the nurses make a little sound, an indrawn breath.

‘Nobody,’ Swanny said, and again, ‘nobody.’

That was all. Nothing else. Did it mean anything? Did it mean, nobody understands, nobody knows, nobody can go with me now? Or was she referring to herself? Was she nobody? Was she like Melchizedek, without father, without mother, and without descent? I shall never know. She didn’t speak again. Her throat rattled as the last breath was expelled from her lungs, her hand slackened, her mouth closed and grew still. The light went out of her eyes.

Carol, the day nurse, came over and touched her forehead. She felt for a pulse, shook her head and closed Swanny’s eyes. I saw the youth come back into Swanny’s face, the lines fade, the cheeks and forehead grow smooth. It always happens, Carol told me later, they always get to look young like that.

Clare and Carol said they would leave me alone with her but I only waited there a moment. Already I could feel the heat of life withdrawing itself and I didn’t want to touch Swanny grown cold.

‘Why do you think your mother waited so long?’ I asked Paul. ‘She was over forty and Swanny was fifty-eight.’

‘Something must have happened to set her off. It was usually some jealousy or resentment. Or a slight or the man or woman in question had done something to offend her. I wish I didn’t have to say that but I do. In the case of the man who was gay all he’d done was pass her by in the street without speaking to her.’

‘I always thought the person who sent the letter must have seen Swanny’s picture in the
Tatler.
’

‘That would have been enough to do it. Did she look happy and prosperous and well-dressed and beautiful?’

I nodded. And then he laughed and I laughed. It wasn’t funny but who can claim we laugh because we’re amused?

How did his mother know Swanny wasn’t Asta’s child? I asked him that and he said he supposed his grandmother had told her. His grandmother must have known. Asta and she were living in the same house. Asta couldn’t have given birth to a dead baby, somehow found a substitute live one, gone out in the street to find one or had one brought to her, without Hansine knowing at least something of it. Somewhere in the diaries Asta refers to her and Hansine having been through so much together. It’s clear she had a special relationship with Hansine, though not a very warm or sympathetic one.