Asta's Book (12 page)

After he was dead and Asta was dead she told me she was afraid of what he would think of her. Apparently his family was upper class, he may even have been a scion of a minor aristocracy. Imagine being afraid her own husband might despise her for possibly lowly origins after thirty years of marriage! The worst thing, she said, was not knowing who she was, for by then, by the time she told him, she had made her mother state categorically that she was no more Rasmus’s child than she was Asta’s. Hadn’t Asta herself said, when telling the tale of the orphanage, that if she’d been the finally enlightened wife she wouldn’t have kept the boy but ‘sent him straight back where he came from’?

That his wife had received an anonymous letter shocked Torben. The fact of its being an anonymous letter seems to have angered him more than its contents. Of course he had never seen it.

‘Mother burnt it.’

‘You mean Mother imagined it.’

‘No, I got it, it was sent to me and when I let Mother read it she burnt it.’

Torben dismissed the whole thing as nonsense. I don’t mean he did this peremptorily, he wasn’t that sort of man, but after listening attentively and by then doubtless seeing how distraught it was making her, after considering it and thinking about it, he told her his conclusion was that her mother had made it up.

‘But the letter, Torben.’

‘Ah, yes, that wonderful letter.’

It was a dry look he gave her. He smiled ruefully, he cast up his eyes a very little. She said she knew what he meant, what he was thinking but would never say. She could tell who he thought had sent the letter. He put it all reasonably. Asta was old, Asta was senile. Now, certainly in the last decade of her life, she looked back on a dull existence and wished to invest it with an excitement it had never had. So that she might feel she hadn’t wasted it, so that she could show she had lived. She projected her secret desires on to a life gone by that no one now alive could prove had been different.

The next thing, he said, she would be saying Swanny was her child but not Rasmus’s, hers by a lover. There was a certain kind of woman who did this, it was a well-known fact. Curiously, this did comfort Swanny for a while. She even said to my mother that she wished she’d been sensible and told Torben long before.

However, Asta never did say Swanny was her child by a lover. Torben had perhaps overlooked the fact that she belonged in a generation to whom a married woman’s having a lover wasn’t only unethical, but almost criminal. The diaries show plainly enough what she thought of women who ‘sinned’ in this way and what she thought a woman’s ‘honour’ was. By this time, anyway, she had managed to put the whole business of Swanny’s origins into the past, to bury it. Impatient with discussing it, bored and irritated by it, she made it plain to Swanny that this was the last thing she ever wanted to talk about again.

‘Let’s forget it,
lille
Swanny,’ was her most frequent rejoinder to Swanny’s reiterated questions, or, with exasperation, ‘What a lot of bosh it all is!’

In those years that went by after her confession, she simply dismissed the whole subject as fast as she could. What relevance did something which happened sixty years before have today?

‘I love you, I chose you, you’ve had a good life and you’ve got a good husband’—Asta couldn’t resist adding that this was more than she had had ‘—and you’re comfortable, you want for nothing, so what’s wrong with you, going on like this?’

‘I’ve a right to know who I really am, Mother.’

‘I’ve told you. We adopted you, your father and I. We wanted a girl because we only had boys until Marie came along. We picked you out in an orphanage—there, does that satisfy you? I don’t know what’s the matter with you,
lille
Swanny, I’m the one who should be moaning, I’m the one who lost those babies, one dying after another—but do I complain? Never! I make the best of things, I
get through.
’

You have to understand that Swanny now found herself quite alone. She told me that she felt an outcast in many ways. Her mother, for all her vaunted love, was no longer her mother, had never been her mother. Her sister and brother were not her sister and brother but only the people she had been brought up with. It struck her forcibly at about this time, a year or so after the disclosure, that she was most likely not even Danish. Her Danishness had been important to her in ways she hadn’t fully appreciated until it had been shown not to exist. For a while a curious thing happened and Danish, her cradle tongue, grew stiff on her lips and when she spoke it she felt like an impostor, uttering a language to which she had no right. She had no language, for she had no nationality. And all this was compounded by the ridiculousness of it at her age. What had happened to her, though inevitably an evil, more
suitably
happened to children or adolescents.

One of the worst things was that her husband, who had always been her support, a rock that she could cling to, was no comfort to her here because he simply refused to take it seriously. He wasn’t irritable but he was incredulous. Many times he told her that it was beyond him, an intelligent sensible woman like herself, swallowing any amount of nonsense her senile mother chose to tell her. For his part, he had never believed it, had never doubted, and he claimed to be able to see strong resemblances between his wife and various personages in Mormor’s photographs of ancestors.

Then why had Mor said it? She got it out of Dickens, Torben said, with some triumph at finding this ingenious solution. It was true that Mormor seldom read anything but Dickens and read him all the time, true too that children turning out not to be who and whose they seem figure prominently in his plots. Look at Estella, look at Esther Summerson, said Torben, himself no mean reader. Asta was senile and she confused fiction with reality, fantasy with fact. Swanny realized something she had never noticed before, that Torben disliked her mother.

Asta’s cancer was something she had imagined or invented or thought up as a useful ploy. For a woman of her advanced age, she was exceptionally strong and healthy. It was my mother who had cancer and died of it.

She had been going to be married. I don’t mean simply that she was engaged, she had been engaged several times, but this time it was serious, George the last fiancé was serious, and they were to be married in Hampstead registry office in August. The cancer she had is called carcinomatosis, a kind of total malignancy that consumes the sufferer very swiftly. She was dead three weeks after diagnosis.

The funeral was at Golders Green and Asta came. Swanny discouraged her but she came, dressed in her funerary uniform, the crossover black silk coat and the pancake hat. After the service, as we were looking at the wreaths laid out in the crematorium garden, she made, very loudly and clearly, one of her devastating remarks.

‘My children are always dying.’

It was true. First the baby Mads, then, presumably, the baby Swanny had replaced, Mogens on the Somme, now her daughter Marie. Since Swanny was not hers, Knud, my Uncle Ken, was the only living child that remained to her.

Swanny said faintly, ‘Oh, Mor …’

‘It’s not so bad as it used to be, I can tell you. You get hard when you get old, these things don’t mean very much. I’ve no feeling left.’ And Asta, to everyone’s shocked astonishment, picked up a large bouquet of roses from the ground, sniffed them and removed the card attached to their stems. ‘I think I’ll take these home,
lille
Swanny. I like red roses. You often forget to put flowers in my room.’

She did take them home, remarking that they were no use to Marie now and that it would have been better if Peter and Sheila (whoever they were) had given her flowers while she was alive.

I went back to Swanny’s house with George and his son Daniel, a very handsome, rather quiet man of about my own age, who was a psychiatrist. These days Swanny could have had counselling for her problems of identity and loss but not in the 1960s. Even to go to a psychiatrist seemed a daring step to take. But it crossed my mind to suggest this to him as we arrived in Willow Road. He seemed pleasant, not watchful of one’s every move as they sometimes are, not superior or remote.

At the funeral he had asked me who Asta was and shown interest in her in a rather unusual way. He spoke the way men do when admiring some beautiful young woman they want to know better.

‘Who’s
that?
’

‘My grandmother.’

‘She looks remarkable. It’s hardly suitable to say it here but she looks as if she knows how to enjoy life.’

I said, and I meant it, ‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m very sorry about your mother.’ He’d said that before, perhaps he had forgotten. ‘I’d have liked her for a stepmother.’

Someone must have introduced him to Asta, for I came upon them in Swanny’s drawing room, deep in talk. She was telling him the story of the man her cousin knew in Sweden who murdered his mistress to get their child for his wife. I wondered if Swanny had also speculated about any relevance this story might have to her own origins, though hardly casting Far in the killer’s role.

In the event, I did nothing about getting Swanny to a psychiatrist, Daniel Blain or anyone else. My mother’s death affected her deeply but it distracted her from her own troubles. It also drew her closer to me or me to her. Her sister Marie had been her closest woman friend, she had no child of her own. It was only natural that I should become, at least in her own eyes, her daughter.

She mourned. She grieved for her sister. She drew closer once more to Torben who shared her sorrow, who sympathized utterly. He had loved my mother as a sister but I hope I don’t wrong him in saying that as far as he was concerned, if she had to die, there was no better time for her to have done it. Her death restored his wife to him and banished from her mind—as far as he could tell—all that introspective brooding over her origins.

He had never, of course, been as bad as Uncle Ken, an insensitive brash man who, in any woman between the ages of thirty-five and sixty, blamed every divergence from the strictest convention on ‘her time of life’. Before my mother died, before my mother was even ill, Swanny had gone to him with her desperate inquiry. He, after all, had been
there.
He had been, not an infant, but a child of five at the time, a child of school age.

She could remember herself at five. She recalled the death of Edward VII in the May of that year and her father saying the Danish Queen was a widow now. She even remembered one of the scandalous stories so dear to the heart of Asta who repeated the rumour that Queen Alexandra wore collars of diamonds to hide the scars on her neck where the King had tried to strangle her. Surely Ken could remember Asta giving birth to a daughter, his being shown the child, the nurse or doctor or both in the house. At that time she was passing through one of those semi-hopeful phases, in which she went along with Torben and tried not to believe any of it.

Ken couldn’t remember. He said, quite proudly according to Swanny, that he remembered absolutely nothing of what had happened before he was six. He could barely remember the house in Lavender Grove which they had moved out of when he was six and a half. She, Swanny, had always been there in his life.

‘It’s her age,’ he said to Torben, basely repeating to her husband everything Swanny had asked him. ‘They go a bit mad, I’ve noticed it time and time again. And it takes them all of seven years to get over it. At the very least.’

I’ve since wondered if Ken couldn’t remember because (as Daniel might have said) he blocked off that early childhood, if trauma excised those years which were too painful for recall to be allowed. They must have been bad years, with the continual shifting from place to place and country to country, his parents’ vicious quarrels, the death of a baby brother, the move to England and a new language and his father’s apparent desertion. No doubt that would have been enough to blot out the past. Things got better soon afterwards; the year of Swanny’s birth was the family’s lowest ebb.

On the other hand, he may have remembered but been too bolshie to tell. That again would have been typical. Women shouldn’t be indulged in their fancies, women were ‘strange beasts’. He often said how glad he was never to have had a daughter. But I don’t believe he knew any more than he told. The facts of conception, pregnancy, birth, were carefully kept from children when he was a child. Mor went to bed and someone brought her a baby. She says so in her diary.

Maybe it was true.

Mormor wasn’t a woman who loved nature or even seemed to know it was there. A garden to her was a place you sat in when the sun was shining and ate in under an arbour. In fact, one of her contentions with Torben and Swanny was that they had never made proper provision for eating out in their garden. There was no table under a tree with chairs round it, no garden furniture with sunshade to be brought out each spring and arranged in some suitable corner as a breakfast nook or tea place. This she lamented often, citing Padanaram where it had been so ‘cosy’ (a favourite word) to have tea under the mulberry tree. A photograph testified to this: Asta pouring tea from a great silver pot, Swanny beside her, my mother on Morfar’s knee, the boys in Norfolk jackets, and Hansine standing behind and beaming, got up in a maid’s uniform and cap for the occasion. Torben disliked eating in the open air and earned her incredulity by saying so.

Because it was impossible to sit there, except on a hard teak bench, Mormor seldom went into the Willow Road garden. There were flowers but not the sort she liked. Her preference was for florist’s rosebuds and scented waxen exotics out of hothouses. Swanny and Torben employed a gardener who came two or three times a week. Even then, in the sixties, I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to have bonfires; even then, London and its suburbs were called a smokeless zone. Still, he did occasionally have them to burn autumn leaves and path sweepings and, according to Swanny, was very surprised one afternoon to see ‘the old lady’ come down the path and make off with his wheelbarrow. If he asked her what she wanted it for Mormor probably played deaf, as she sometimes did when she didn’t want to answer, though her hearing was as good as mine. Off she went with the wheelbarrow, at a run, the gardener said, marvelling at her vigour.