Asta's Book (11 page)

You would have expected my mother and me to have discussed all this after she had gone but we didn’t. My mother said only that the letter writer probably thought it was true—why did we assume it was a woman?—but that the story probably derived from an invention of Asta’s. You could imagine Asta romancing on about foundlings, several of her stories were about that very subject, and some listeners actually took them seriously. She said it lightly enough, trivializing the whole thing, to make further serious conversation about it impossible. The subject was changed. The fiancé, he who was to be the last of them, the final lover that she was going to marry ‘one day’ to make it all respectable perhaps, he arrived and shortly afterwards I left. Not another word was said about Swanny and quite a long time went by before I heard the outcome.

If this had been one of Asta’s stories it would have involved a tremendous scene with a climax, an opening of the heart and ultimately some sort of confession. But it wasn’t, it was life itself, which she so loved to embroider. Swanny told my mother that after another two days’ delay she came out with it and asked Asta. When it came to it she was actually trembling, she felt sick. The night before, repeatedly telling herself this would be the last night before she knew, she had hardly slept.

Then, in the morning, she nearly fell into further procrastination. Wasn’t anything better than to know? But could she bear to go on not knowing? She and her mother were alone in the house. The ‘daily’ woman didn’t come every day. Swanny pursued her usual tasks, those aspects of housework she enjoyed, polishing certain pieces of furniture, tidying up to improve the look of one of the large reception rooms, taking a delivery of flowers and putting them into her Chinese vases. It was high summer but not at all warm. The grass was bright green and the trees in rich full leaf and the garden full of flowers, but the sky was leaden grey and it was cool.

Asta was still upstairs in her room on the third floor. She often didn’t appear till coffee time but always by then, invariably to come out with some remark about the impossibility of a Dane’s existing without coffee. Fantasies flowed through Swanny’s mind, one after another. Asta had gone away and married Uncle Harry. Asta had died up there. Asta was lying there dead. She thought, not that she would grieve or miss her, but that then she would never know the truth of it.

As the time approached eleven she grew even more sick with tension. It was all stupid, she knew that. Here she was, a woman in late middle age, going out of her mind with anxiety because a week before a poison-pen letter had told her she wasn’t her parents’ child. The letter itself she had read and re-read, had quite got over comparing it to a bag of vomit or a dead rat, had become entirely familiar with it, had long known the words by heart.

Asta came down at two minutes to eleven, her white hair netted, her face well-powdered, dressed in dark blue (‘a dark-blue walking costume’) with the butterfly-wing brooch holding a navy-blue scarf in place. Her butterfly-wing eyes were so bright that on some days the beam from them itself looked blue, a shaft of coloured light.

She only ever said two things at this point, so it must have been one or other of them: the remark about the indispensability of coffee to Danes or, ‘Do I smell the good coffee?’

Swanny brought the coffee in. It was soon to be Asta’s eighty-third birthday and she intended to have what she called a chocolate party. That is, Swanny was to have a chocolate party for her. I had once been to one of these and very good it was. No one would give a feast like this today, for the drink was sweet hot chocolate into which you put a huge dollop of whipped cream and the food was
kransekage
, a wonderful cake made of an almond-paste mixture and shaped like a multi-layered crown. Asta was talking about this, whom they should invite and so on, what other food should be served. Swanny interrupted her to say she had something she wanted to ask her, speaking so breathlessly that even Asta could tell something was wrong. She asked her what was wrong.

Then Swanny came out with it. She said it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to ask anyone. She said she thought it would kill her. Her blood pressure rose and her head drummed. The words came out hoarsely.

Asta was silent. She had a look on her face, Swanny said afterwards, of someone who had been caught out in a forbidden act, a how-can-I-get-out-of-this-one look, a child taking one of mother’s chocolates. Her eyes moved, the blue gaze cast up, then shifting to the right, to the left. She looked appalled, she looked trapped, Swanny said, and then she burst out laughing.

‘Oh, don’t laugh,’ Swanny cried out. ‘Please don’t. I’ve been in such a state. I’ve lain awake nights. But if it’s a lie you can laugh. Is it a lie?’

Asta, of course, said the worst thing she could. She often did. ‘If you want it to be,
lille
Swanny. If that makes you happy it can be a lie. What is truth anyway?’

‘Moder,’
said Swanny, and she hardly ever called Asta by the more formal word, ‘I have a right to know, I must know. Please look at this letter.’

Asta took it and looked at it. Of course she couldn’t see it without her glasses and these had to be groped for in her handbag, taken out of their case, perched on her nose. She read the letter and then she did what seemed an awful thing to Swanny. Before Swanny could stop her she had torn it in two, in four, across again, reduced it to tiny pieces.

Swanny gave a cry and tried to take the pieces of paper from her but Asta, just like a child in the school playground, like a teasing, crowing child, held up the paper scraps high above her head, shaking the hand that clutched them like someone waving frenetically. She waved the scraps in the air, uttering a high-pitched amused, ‘No, no, no, no!’

‘Why did you do that? Please give me those pieces. I must have that letter. I must put it together again.’

Before she could stop her, Asta had picked up a lighter and set fire to the pieces in an ashtray. She looked defiantly at Swanny and brushed her hands against each other as if the paper had laid a coating of dust on them.

‘Oh, this is so silly, Swanny. At your age! Don’t you know what to do with anonymous letters? You burn them. Everyone knows that.’

‘Why did you burn it? How could you?’

‘Because burning is the best thing for it.’

‘How could you, how could you?’

Mormor wasn’t in the least embarrassed. She wasn’t upset or remorseful. Swanny said she had the curious feeling that her mother had no emotions left, they were all used up, nothing mattered any more except the things you suppose old women don’t care about: having a good time, dressing up, eating and drinking, having a man friend to go about with.

She made one of those dismissive gestures of hers, a turning of her head one way, a wave of her hand in the opposite direction, the implication that this was all too trivial, too time-wasting. Swanny hadn’t touched her coffee but Asta drank hers. She could always drink coffee and tea scalding hot, though one of her favourite stories was about some relation who had burnt a hole in his oesophagus doing just that.

‘Mother,’ said Swanny, ‘you must tell me. Is it true?’

‘I don’t know why you mind so much. Haven’t I been a good mother to you? Haven’t I loved you best? Aren’t I here with you now? What’s wrong with you, digging up what’s all past and gone?’

Of course Swanny asked her again and this time, she said, a cunning look passed across her mother’s face. It was just the same as the look Asta put on when lying to them as children. They always knew. In the evening when she and their father appeared all dressed-up: ‘Are you going out?’ ‘Of course not. Why would I go out?’ Or when their parents embarked upon a particularly vicious quarrel, with insults and reproaches flying: ‘Do you really wish you hadn’t married Far?’ ‘Don’t be silly, of course not.’

‘Of course it isn’t true,
lille
Swanny.’

‘Then why? I mean, why did someone write it?’

‘Am I God? Am I a psychiatrist? How should I know why mad people do what they do. You should be thankful someone here has a little sense and knows that the right thing is to burn dirty evil letters. You should appreciate your good mother who cares for you.’

Asta was going out. She had had her coffee, brought her hat downstairs with her and now she was going out. She never said where she was going or when she’d be back. While she was out she would buy some cards to send for her chocolate party.

Left alone, Swanny told herself she must believe. Believe and forget. Of the existence of the diaries she had no idea at that time. They were just books Mor had brought with her. More photograph albums, she thought, if she thought about them at all. Had she known, she told me years later, she’d have gone through the lot that day while Asta was out. I must believe, she said aloud in that empty room, talking to the flowers and the coffee cups.

Asta wasn’t like an old woman, not like an old mother with her daughter, instead, Swanny was the mother and Asta her adolescent daughter whom she suspected of some terrible act the girl had no intention of admitting. The girl, as a girl might be in such a situation, was in control. Swanny was powerless.

That evening, in front of Torben, after dinner but still at the table, Asta announced that she had something to tell them. She might be going to die. It might happen quite soon. In the nature of things she couldn’t live long, but as it happened she suspected she had cancer.

They were all concern, all sympathy and inquiry. As it turned out, the tests subsequently done on Asta were negative, she didn’t have cancer, there was nothing wrong with her. Perhaps she suspected there was, perhaps on the other hand it was all done for effect, because she so much enjoyed making dramas. But that evening she went up to bed early for her and asked Swanny to come to her bedroom when she was undressed.

This was a most unusual, an unprecedented, request. Swanny expected when she got there to have symptoms recounted which her mother might think unfit for Torben’s ears, though it would have been unlike Asta to have such qualms. Instead, she told her what she had prevaricated about that morning. She had always meant to tell Swanny before she died. To die with something like that on her conscience wouldn’t be right.

She didn’t look guilty, Swanny said, she looked pleased with herself. She wasn’t in bed but sitting by the bed, wrapped in a bright kingfisher-blue silk robe Uncle Ken’s wife had given her for Christmas and which Swanny never remembered seeing her wear before, she had said so vehemently how she disliked it. Her eyes were like buttons covered with the same material.

‘You may as well know it all,’ she said. ‘You’re not mine. I mean, I didn’t give birth to you. I adopted you when you were a few days old.’

It took a while for the shock to strike. It always does. Perhaps it was because Swanny was stunned that she could speak, and speak calmly.

‘Like the people in that story of yours?’ she said. ‘The one about the couple who went to the orphanage in Odense. Was that you and Far?’

Asta didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’

Even then Swanny knew of course that it couldn’t have been. The dates were wrong. Her mother was living in London when she was born, she was born there, it was on her birth certificate, while her father was somewhere in Denmark. But she wanted so desperately to believe. This way, though he had never loved her, she could have Rasmus Westerby for her father.

‘Why didn’t you tell me when I was young?’

Asta shrugged. ‘You were mine. I thought of you as mine. I forgot you were someone else’s.’

‘Was Far my father?’

‘There wasn’t much to be said for my husband,
lille
Swanny, but he wouldn’t have betrayed his own wife. He wasn’t as bad as that. I’m surprised you can suggest it.’

Swanny said she screamed. She screamed out and covered her mouth. ‘You’re surprised! You’re surprised! You tell me these things and you’re surprised at what I say.’

Asta was quite cool and calm. ‘Of course I’m surprised when you speak like that to your mother.’

‘You’re not my mother, you’ve just said so. Is it true?’

Again that strange look, Swanny said, an indifferent smile, a half-acknowledgement of naughtiness committed. Anyone who knew Asta recognized it at once from her description.

‘Am I a criminal,
lille
Swanny? Are you a policeman?’

Swanny said, like the child she had been at the time, ‘He didn’t make the doll’s house for me.’

‘You’re just a big baby. Come and give me a kiss.’

She beckoned, she lifted her cheek. Swanny said she felt like taking hold of this little old woman and shaking her, seizing her by the throat, torturing the truth out of her—tell me, tell me. She kissed her meekly and went away to cry.

Torben found her crying in their bedroom and he took her in his arms to comfort her. He thought she was crying because her mother hadn’t long to live. But Asta wasn’t dying. She would live another eleven years.

7

HOW THOSE ELEVEN YEARS
passed, in that particular aspect of them, she told me in that time when we became close, after my mother was dead. I mean, of course, that she didn’t tell me everything, for no one ever does, but she told me what she chose I should know.

After that first confrontation with Asta over the coffee cups, after the second that night in Asta’s room, it was a long while before she said anything to Torben. My mother was her confidante but forbidden, for the time being, to discuss any of it with Asta herself. So why was Torben kept in the dark? Everyone said theirs was a good marriage, they seemed devoted to each other, inseparable. The story of his long ardent courtship was well-known. It was possible when with them to see the occasional conspiratorial glance which passed from him to her, the half-smile she gave him covertly in return. At home they spoke Danish together, their private language, their personal code. But she didn’t tell him what her mother had confessed to her.

When my mother saw her she was often distraught, with dark rings round her eyes from lack of sleep. She even got tranquillizers from the doctor. Didn’t Torben see? Didn’t he notice these changes? Or did she lie to him and attribute these effects to some other cause?