Asta's Book (17 page)

Swanny found nothing more, no letters, no documents. She said she went into her own bedroom after that and contemplated her birth certificate. This wasn’t, of course, the first time she had looked at it since the arrival of the letter. It was more like the hundredth time. But she looked at it now and saw once again that her birth had been registered on August 21st, 1905, at 55 Sandringham Road, Dalston, the Registrar’s Office for the South-west Hackney District. Her name was there as Swanhild (the other names, Rasmus’s choice, had not yet been added), her father given as Rasmus Peter Westerby, engineer, aged thirty-one, and her mother as Asta Birgit Westerby, nee Kastrup, aged twenty-five. The Registrar had signed the certificate as Edward Malby.

It was all beyond her understanding.

10

THE DAY BEFORE
I was due to meet Cary and take her to look at the diaries I went up to Willow Road to see for myself. It was years since I had seen for myself, fourteen years in fact since Swanny showed me the originals.

I wasn’t able to park the car anywhere near the house but had to drive round and round before resigning myself to leaving the car on what seemed the only vacant place in Hampstead, half a mile away in Pond Street. I don’t think I would have recognized Gordon Westerby among the crowd of commuters coming out from Hampstead Heath Station. I wouldn’t have given him a second glance if he hadn’t hailed me so enthusiastically.

The weather was much warmer than on that dreary April day when we had first met at Swanny’s funeral and he had made his own concessions to it. But these were in the direction of lightness, not informality. Although it wasn’t raining, rain wasn’t forecast and there had been none for a week, he was wearing a raincoat, the kind of thing you see on detective inspectors in television police procedurals. His collar was as high as at the funeral but less stiff and evidently part of a blue-and-white-striped shirt that matched a plain blue tie. Also matching each other were his glossy black shoes and briefcase.

‘I hoped I’d run into you,’ he said. He spoke very earnestly as if a chance encounter was the only means open to us of getting together. The posts didn’t exist, the telephone hadn’t been invented. ‘I’m very glad to see you.’

‘But what are you doing here?’ I said, half-amused, half-puzzled. Was he on his way to Willow Road?

‘I live here.’ He seemed a little worried by my surprise. ‘I have a half-share in a flat in Roderick Road. Did you think I lived with my parents?’

I hadn’t thought about it at all. I’d scarcely thought about him. Evidently he didn’t expect an answer but said confidentially, inclining his head closer, ‘When I came out of the closet it was naturally an embarrassment to them. The kindest thing was to move out. We’re on extremely good terms, you mustn’t think otherwise.’

I assured him I wouldn’t but I did wonder why, living where he did, he’d never been to see his great-aunt.

‘That family tree I mentioned to you, I had this rather brilliant idea. There are going to be more diaries published, aren’t there?’

Yes, certainly, I said. Next year or the year after.

‘Only when I’ve done my tree, it could go in. Go in the book, I mean. And when they reissue past editions it could go in those too. What do you think?’

He levelled at me an earnest, intense, scrutinizing stare. His eyes were Asta’s, but the shade was paler, faintly diluted. If hers were oil his were watercolour.

‘I’ve bought the diaries in paperback. I’ve never read them, you see. It will be a weekend treat for me. My friend that I share with and I, we very much like reading aloud to each other.’

I asked him if he needed help with the tree. By no means all the details of Asta’s and Rasmus’s forebears and connections were to be found in the diaries but I thought I could fill in the gaps.

‘I’ve been relying on you,’ he said. ‘I was sure you’d say that. My father knows nothing. I’ve noticed how women are interested in families and men not at all. I’m always coming across that when I’m in pursuit of my hobby.’ For the first time he smiled, showing a double row of large Bertie Wooster-like teeth. ‘We’ll get together,’ he said, remarked that it had been nice meeting me and set off rapidly in the direction of Gospel Oak.

Swanny’s house, for I still thought of it like that, seemed peculiarly silent but it was warm and fresh-smelling. That gleaming quality it had always held for me was still there, the sensation a little like walking into a jewel box. Swanny and Torben had had so much silver and brass, so much glass in ornaments and on chandeliers, that the rooms never seemed still but always filled with tiny moving lights. At all times of the day and night that glitter in various forms was present, the moon-shaped shine on the curve of a vase, the burnish on bowl and cup, the flash on the facet of a prism, the bright running spot made by the reflection from cut glass. In the absence of sunshine all this gleam and glitter was muted. It had become subtle and expectant as if it waited for the rain to cease and the dark to lift.

Torben had always kept a room downstairs as his study. I don’t know what he studied there, or read or wrote, come to that, he must have had plenty of room for that kind of thing at his Embassy, but men of his kind always did have studies while women had sewing rooms. After his death it remained empty until Swanny took it over for her own purposes. She always called it her room, with a slight emphasis on the second word. It was in there that she was photographed when the
Sunday Times
made her the subject of one of their
A Life in the Day of
series.

I’d often been in the study and I knew Asta’s notebooks weren’t there. Swanny had added a word processor and a photocopier to Torben’s rather austere appointments, his fountain pen and blotter and Crown Derby inkwell. The house contained a lot of books, several thousands probably, and most of them were in the study that was very nearly a book-lined room. The three volumes published as
Asta, A Live Thing in a Dead Room
, and
Bright Young Middle-Age
Swanny had rather self-consciously displayed on shelves in all the languages into which they had been translated, Icelandic being the most recent of these. Hanging up on the wall in a frame of pale polished wood was the (much enlarged) facsimile page from the first notebook.

Swanny had hob-nobbed with publishers and met eminent writers at parties, been an honoured guest at her agent’s and been on promotional tours, but she had never quite attained the true book person’s attitude to books, a total familiarity with them, an indifference to their exteriors and commitment to what lies between the covers. She never lost that certain reverence she had for a published book. So a first edition of
Asta
, boxed in a presentation case, stood propped up on her desk, partly propped in fact by the Gyldendal limited edition in D format and lavishly illustrated, while bound but uncorrected proof copies, even those numbered one in the run, were relegated to the lowest tier of the bookshelves that filled the wall facing the desk.

I’ve said that the notebooks, the originals of the diaries, weren’t there. What I meant was that the notebooks weren’t, and had never been, anywhere visible. I looked through the desk drawers, on the off-chance, having the shadow of that feeling Swanny had when she raided and riffled through Asta’s room. Swanny, however, hadn’t gone as Asta had to see a relative in Twickenham. Swanny was dead. A pang assailed me, I closed the drawers and sat there unseeing of limited editions and presentation copies, thinking of her frantic efforts and of the peculiar predicament of the seeker after truth who is aware that the one person who knows what it is will never be made to divulge it.

Torben had had another heart attack six months later and died of it. With his death Swanny entered the nadir of her life, perhaps indeed her only really low ebb, for as she said to me after the tide had turned for her and for a while washed away much of her misery, she had been a happy woman, a sheltered, protected, indulged and loved woman. Apart from feeling so deeply the death of her brother Mogens when she was eleven, she had known no sorrow.

It had always meant much to her that she was openly declared to be her mother’s favourite child. Torben’s passion and his enduring devotion had placed her in a position of privilege. She told me that she lived daily with the certain knowledge of her husband’s worship, that when he came home to her each evening it was with a young lover’s breathless excitement, hurrying the last few yards to be there a fraction sooner, that when he and she were in a room full of people the faces of those others were always faint or vague to him, while hers shone with clarity. He told her all this.

Neither of them had much wanted children and when no children came he told her he was glad because he would have been jealous. But it wasn’t jealousy that made him dislike her mother. The cause was quite other. What he called her senility, but couldn’t understand or allow for, had led her to make Swanny unhappy with her lies and fictions. That he could never overlook.

He loved Swanny with the hungry desire he first felt at the age of twenty-two when he saw her across that room in Copenhagen. In one of those letters that Asta had never seen but boasted about at parties, he had told Swanny that if she wouldn’t finally agree to marry him he would die a virgin. Apparently he had never made love to a woman and never would unless it was to her, had ‘saved himself’ for her, to be as ‘pure’ as she, talking of it in the way people presumably did then and which seems so ridiculous to us now. There was something Wagnerian about Torben Kjær, and not only in his height and his Nordic appearance.

Swanny got out those letters and re-read them over and over, staining them, she said, with many tears. The tears were as much from guilt as grief, she confessed to me, for she felt she had never fully appreciated Torben while he was alive. She had never loved him as he loved her. But this may be true of any relationship in which one party loves as passionately and as wholly as that. Human beings, it appears, are capable of almost limitless ardour but not of a matching level of response. Swanny used to say in her misery that it’s better to be the one that kisses than the one that turns the cheek. It’s always better to be the active than the passive, the doer than the done to. She had sometimes been impatient with Torben’s transports.

But now she grieved. She even said she realized only now he was gone how much she had really loved him. She was unwise enough to say this to her mother—but who else, after all, had she to talk to for most of the time?—and Asta was derisive. Of course she had loved him: was she mad? What woman wouldn’t love a man who gave her so much, was so good to her, wrote such letters, was handsome, generous and kind, she Asta should have had such a man, and so on, and so on.

I began paying a regular weekly visit to Willow Road at this time, usually to have an evening meal with Swanny. As well as her grief, she had an increase of arthritis to bear (another cause of wonder and near-disbelief in Asta) and had begun on a series of painful gold injections. Her knees always hurt her now, the joints of her fingers had begun to show swelling. She had lost weight and grown gaunt. No one who saw her then, on those Wednesday or Thursday evenings, when she would cook for me but herself barely eat, would for a moment have foreseen the woman she would become in the eighth decade of her life.

I visited regularly but until Swanny’s last illness I seldom went upstairs. Mounting the stairs now I asked myself where to start. I knew only that Swanny’s bedroom was the big one in the front over the drawing room but I couldn’t imagine her keeping the notebooks in there. In Asta’s own room, then? As I climbed the two higher flights I wondered again at her choice of the third floor and asked myself how a woman of ninety had managed those stairs several times each day while I, more than forty years younger, found it arduous to climb them once. No doubt, she had enjoyed being isolated up here. Like most writers she alternated extreme gregariousness with a powerful physical need for solitude.

The diaries weren’t there.

That isn’t strictly true. The last one was there, the incomplete diary for 1967 that stopped on September 9th. It lay where Swanny had found it, on the desk. The photograph albums were there too, rather consciously ‘arranged’, one of them, for instance, propped upright on the black oak table and open at the picture of Mogens and Knud in sailor suits and with their hair in long curls, the name of the photographer just showing at the foot: H. J. Barby, Gamle Kongevej 178. It had been taken just before they came to England. Two more albums were on a console table, a vase of dried flowers beside them.

I recalled the feature in the
Observer
magazine and the colour plates of this room. Swanny must have arranged things like this and kept them so for the journalists who came and the editors of magazines concerned with domestic interiors. It was a little like a shrine but not intended to house the sixty-two remaining diaries. I pulled open the carved flange in the oak table Swanny had once told me was a secret drawer. Sewing things were inside, needles and a pincushion and a silver thimble, and, incongruously, in a modern plastic zip-bag, the red-and-purple felt pen wiper Swanny had made for her mother’s thirty-third birthday.

There was one more floor. I went up and found rooms no one seemed ever to have lived in, rooms containing trunks, boxes and suitcases, all extremely tidy and well-cared-for. In the first was a hatbox in a large linen bag of the kind called ‘holland’, and a leather travelling wardrobe, stamped in gold with the initials M.S.K. of Torben’s mother. I opened it and found the polished wood hangers still inside on their rail. There were other cases as well and a trunk but all were empty.

I began to sense, as I entered the second of these rooms, something dramatic about to happen, some revelation or some disquieting find. But I had forgotten Swanny, what she was like. I had forgotten her dislike of the sensational, her quiet ways, her prudence. She had suffered more from discovering, at nearly sixty, that she was not her parents’ child than an excitable or romantic woman might have. That went out of my head and I expected, here at the end of her life, and the end of her house, some final shocking gesture.