Asta's Book (15 page)

I didn’t call her back. It was she who had phoned me and I admired her nerve. Fifteen years are nothing, an evening gone, in these matters. If I’m honest I must say I wondered what she could possibly want. The diaries had long been adapted and dramatized for television, not to mention read aloud as ‘A Book at Bedtime’, and a proposal had just come in to put them on audio cassette. But I thought I could live quite contentedly without ever finding out.

A huge pile of letters of condolence had come, had been coming since Swanny’s death nearly two weeks before. Up until a year before she died Swanny had a secretary who came in three days a week. This woman had dealt efficiently with her correspondence, which of course was enormous, but she had left when Swanny had her first stroke and became incapacitated. Swanny could scarcely have signed a letter, still less taken in the sense of it. Besides, in whose name would she have signed at that stage? Along with the other personality she put on, would she have produced that other persona’s signature?

So there was no one but me to reply to the letters and I set about working through them. Swanny hadn’t known many people, that is, she had few personal friends, but she had had thousands of fans, or her mother had, and she had represented her mother to them. I’d written my surely hundredth card to a reader thanking her—they were nearly all women—for her letter and assuring her publication of the diaries wouldn’t stop, when Cary phoned.

She still had her breathless discursive manner. ‘You got my message and you hate me, you’ve been besieged and you’re going to put the phone down, but please, please don’t.’

My mouth had dried. I sounded hoarse to myself. ‘Cary, I won’t put the phone down.’

‘You’ll talk?’

‘I am talking.’ I was thinking, what’s this about being besieged? Had I been besieged? I’d been out and the answering machine had been switched off. I said carefully, ‘It’s a very long time since we talked at all.’

She didn’t speak at the other end but she wasn’t silent.

‘You could get a job in one of your own productions,’ I said, ‘as a heavy breather. You’re very good.’

‘Oh, Ann, have you forgiven me?’

‘Suppose you tell me what you want. Let’s get that straight first. You do want something, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. I said I did. But I’m like a child, I know you think I’m like a child. I want you to tell me everything’s all right first. I want to be forgiven and things made right. I want to start again with a sort of—well, a clean slate.’

I thought, Daniel should hear you now, but I didn’t say it, I didn’t want to mention his name. ‘OK, I forgive you, Cary. Is that all right?’

‘But do you really, Ann?’

‘I really do. Now tell me what you want. Surprise me.’

She did, rather. She waited a while, as if luxuriating in the catharsis of being pardoned, as if it were a warm bath to soak in. The sigh she gave had a purring sound. Then she said, ‘First tell me if you’re putting a total embargo on anyone even taking a peek at the unpublished diaries.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a bit missing from the first diary, as you must know. Are you letting anyone look at it?’

‘Is there a bit missing? I hadn’t noticed.’

‘You haven’t?”

‘I don’t even know what you mean, a bit missing. Entries that ought to be there and aren’t or what?’

‘If you don’t know, I’ll breathe again, I’ll know there’s a chance for me.’

The most improbable reason for the request that was to come was that she might be interested in Swanny’s origins. After all, Swanny might have become a well-known figure, broadcasting, and going on television, being interviewed by magazines and so on, but even while she was alive that she was or was not Asta’s natural daughter would have been only of minor interest. It was Asta who interested people. Swanny was only her go-between, in a way her mouthpiece, her interpreter. And now she was dead, public concern was not for her but for the future of the unpublished diaries she might or might not have edited. Still, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that what Cary wanted to know about was Swanny’s birth. I must have been very involved with it myself, more than I was aware of.

‘I’m sure there’s nothing about my aunt’s babyhood that hasn’t already appeared in print.’

‘Your aunt’s babyhood? Ann, who’s your aunt? I don’t even know who your aunt is.’

‘Swanny Kjær.’

‘O God, yes. I’m sorry, I knew she was some relative, it hadn’t really registered she was your aunt. What about her babyhood? You surely haven’t had the paparazzi pestering you about that?’

I asked her, if it wasn’t that, what was it?

‘Ann, could we meet? Would you? Could you bear it?’

I thought for a moment and decided I could. Of course I could. ‘But you can tell me what for?’

‘Roper,’ she said. ‘I want to do a series on Roper.’

I said, truthfully, that I didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘In Volume I, in
Asta
, the very first entries, there’s a bit about what’s she called, the maid …’

‘Hansine.’

‘Yes, Hansine, coming home and saying she’d made friends with the maid in a lodging house in the next street or a street nearby.’

That was probably the first instance of someone approaching me and taking it for granted I had all the diaries’ contents, word for word, off by heart. Soon there were to be many. ‘I suppose so.’

‘And she goes on to say more later, about the woman coming to tea with Hansine and the people she works for. Well, the people she worked for were Roper and his wife and mother-in-law. There! D’you mean you really didn’t know?’

The name meant nothing to me. I wonder now that I didn’t ask to be enlightened but I didn’t and just made a date with Cary to meet her in two days’ time. The beginnings of curiosity came when I’d put the phone down. I found my own copy of
Asta
and read those first entries. There was no mention of anyone called Roper. I found the references to the old man falling down in the street, to Hansine’s friend and the people she worked for. They were a man and his wife and the wife’s mother. The maid spoke of ‘her mistress, Mrs Hyde’, not Mrs Roper. Later on, Asta wrote how she went to the street where these people lived, looked at their house and saw a woman come out with a child.

That was in the entry for July 26th, 1905, two days before Swanny’s birth. There were no more entries until August 30th, something I’d never noticed before and which rather surprised me, though it did no more than that at the time. Gaps did occur in the diaries, Asta hadn’t written in her notebooks every day, nor for that matter every week. Later on I found a reference on October 15th to ‘the man who murdered his wife in Navarino Road’, but again no name was given. That was all. No explanation, no details. Asta evidently wasn’t much concerned. Nor was I—then.

Of much more interest was the next letter I opened. It was from someone called Paul Sellway.

Here was a name that meant something to me but I wasn’t sure what. I thought about it for a moment before reading what he had to say. Sellway, Sellway … Had some relative of Maureen’s, Ken’s wife, married a Sellway? I got no further. I read it.

He wanted me to know how he sympathized with me on the death of my aunt. He just remembered her, having met her once when he was a boy and soon after his grandmother died. The letter was several paragraphs long but it wasn’t until the last one that he explained who he was. The son of Joan (née Cropper) and Ronald Sellway, born in 1943, and therefore the grandson of Hansine Fink. His letter was headed: Dr P. G. Sellway, with an address in London E8.

I found myself, for some reason, imagining how Asta would have reacted. She had been a snob and, like most snobs, with no justification for such an attitude. To learn that Paul Sellway was a doctor (a calling she deeply respected though rather disliked) would have made her incredulous. What, the grandson of illiterate Hansine, a doctor! The descendant of that Fink, that peasant, like the wretched Karoline, no better than a farm animal! That Morfar himself came out of the same sort of stable (in more senses than one) affected this view not at all. She herself had the dubious distinction of being two generations, instead of one, away from clogs.

Swanny had felt very differently. Pursuing her search for her own origins, she had gone to Hansine’s daughter. This was about two years after my mother’s death. She had adjusted to her younger sister’s dying, was used to the fact of it, had learned to use her Wednesdays in other ways and accustom herself to the absence of that daily phone call. Into that empty space, in much the same way as nature abhors a vacuum, returned her anxieties about her own provenance.

Hansine herself, though only a few months older than Asta, had died in the early fifties. That death, or its aftermath, must have been the occasion of Swanny’s encounter with Paul Sellway. I’ve a vague memory, not of Swanny’s going to Hansine’s funeral—neither she nor my mother nor Asta did that—but of her calling on the daughter some days or weeks later for a purpose now forgotten. Perhaps Hansine asked Joan Sellway to give Swanny something of hers for a keepsake. Swanny had been her favourite among the Westerby children, as she was Asta’s.

Now Swanny went to see her again, though it wasn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, Joan Sellway had moved. Swanny phoned the old number and got a stranger who had no idea where the Sellways now were. You have to understand that Swanny both wanted to find her and did not want to find her. She wanted to know the truth and she was at the same time afraid to know it. She was once more working herself up into a state.

I was to trace her. Swanny wasn’t the first person to treat me, because of my profession, like a private detective. I would know how to go about it, I would run her to earth. In fact, anyone could have done it, there was no difficulty. Joan Sellway or Ronald Sellway, her husband, weren’t in the London phone book because they had moved outside the range of its area. I found her in Borehamwood in the local directory.

And now I must be careful what I say about Joan Sellway. I never knew her, I can’t speak from experience and it would be wrong in me, particularly in me, to report on her character from hearsay. In any case, she was no more than cold to Swanny and she seemed simply not to understand.

She was a tall fair-haired woman, big-boned and gaunt, that Swanny called ‘a certain Danish type’, with large blue eyes and strong capable hands. Her response to Swanny’s questions was to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At last, as if by a great effort to take the ravings of madness seriously, she came out triumphantly with, ‘Why don’t you ask your mother?’

Swanny said she had and explained the result of asking.

‘I’d rather you talked to my son,’ Mrs Sellway kept saying.

This, of course, was the Paul of the letter. She very much wanted Swanny to refer all this to her son, evidently the rock she leant on after her husband had left her, and Swanny’s asking how would he know, he wasn’t there, had very little effect.

‘
I
wasn’t there,’ Joan Sellway said.

Swanny could see no resemblance in her to Hansine. Asta’s maid-of-all-work had been a jolly smiling woman, motherly where Asta wasn’t, caring and dependable. Or that was how she remembered her.

‘I just thought your mother might have said something to you about that time. I mean about the time she was with my mother.’

‘She didn’t.’

And then Swanny understood from Joan Sellway’s manner, a kind of retreat even further into herself, a terrible anger totally repressed, that she had never wanted to know about her mother’s life before her marriage, had perhaps asked her not to speak of it in front of her husband, her son. Her mother had been in service. Her mother had been in a menial position in the employ of this woman’s mother. And what had
she
done that she should be subjected to these mean inquiries from a woman who was no better than she, she with her nice house in Borehamwood, her son about to be a doctor? Probably the woman had only come there, was only asking, to mock her, to taunt her with her mother’s humble, even shameful, origins. Swanny knew she must not press it but knew too that Joan Sellway had nothing to tell, knew nothing, was as ignorant as she was but with no desire to end that ignorance, no motive for ending it.

Swanny was humbled. She saw, or thought she saw, that she was making a fool of herself, but she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t stop. She was worse than before my mother died. And all the time she was afraid that Asta herself would soon be beyond disclosing the truth. Even if she were willing to do so, Asta herself would have declined too far into senility to remember or to speak coherently of her memories. In fact, there were no signs as far as I could see, at that time, when Asta was in her ninth decade, that she was anything other than she had always been, capricious, stubborn, self-absorbed, outrageous and curiously charming.

It was Torben who had put the idea of her approaching senility into Swanny’s head. Asta’s senility, in his view, was responsible for what he called ‘this whole sad business’. Swanny wanted to think her senile because that might mean the ‘sad business’ was what Torben thought it was, a lot of nonsense. But if Asta was senile would she ever be able to tell her daughter the truth, always supposing she wanted to?

She went to Uncle Harry. He was younger than Asta by two or three years but had worn less well. Who hadn’t? He still lived alone but was looked after by his bevy of daughters, all married and all but one living nearby in Leyton.

Asta used to say how much he loved Swanny, how he’d taken to her when first they met when she was only fourteen. He called on Asta at Padanaram to give her a first-hand account of her son’s death. It was quite the usual thing, something survivors of war did, went to bereaved parents to comfort them with the story of the dead child’s last hours, his courage, his fortitude in suffering and his glorious—it always had to be that—his glorious, noble, courageous death. Emily had answered the door to him but it was Swanny he found when she showed him into the drawing room and Swanny he spoke to during the ten minutes they waited for Asta to come down.