Asta's Book (18 page)

The cardboard crates in this room contained books, but they were stacked so that the spine of each one could be seen. Most of them were Swedish, publications of Bonniers and Hugo Geber, in those old paperback editions with flimsy, light fawn covers. In among them, with a label on it in Torben’s handwriting was that diary kept by his aunt or cousin while she was living in St Petersburg in 1913. I took it out, looked at it and thought once again how the handwriting of every European before, say, 1920 looks the same, forward-sloping, looped, pleasing to look at but not easy to read. I could read none of it and put it back where it had come from.

One room remained. I was making the drama myself, for none derived from the physical evidence. Furniture stood about, chairs stacked seat-to-seat and legs-to-back, a table and two more chairs in the art deco or moderne style that obviously would have been unsuitable downstairs. The mahogany cupboard with the double doors was the last place in the house where the diaries might be and there they were.

It seemed to me that I had found them at the end of the world. I had been searching for three hours. Yet I immediately saw what a sensible place this was: because heat rises this was the warmest part of the house, away from the ministrations of cleaners, among other stored, cared-for but seldom used possessions, far enough away from the habitually lived-in parts of the house to avoid some visitor coming upon them and indulging his or her curiosity, to avoid in fact some journalist’s serendipity.

Each volume was in a plastic bag and each group of ten contained in a larger bag. These were secured with two rubber bands. It was possible to see through the double layer of plastic that each volume was labelled with its year and through the single layer each batch labelled with the dates it encompassed. There was nothing to show that some of the notebooks had been translated, edited and published.

I felt a certain awe. Then I reminded myself that the diaries were mine now, insofar as they were anyone’s, the copyright being Swanny’s still and for many years to come. I took out the first parcel, the one on the left at the top, that was labelled 1905-1914. This constituted
Asta
, and these were the diaries Cary Oliver wanted to see. Specifically, it was the first notebook she wanted to see.

A smell came off the page, not Coty’s L’Aimant but the sweetish dusty smell of early decay. The mould spots, the size of a small coin, had faded to a pale coffee colour. But I could read what was written. Knowing as I did, as thousands of ardent readers must do, the first lines by heart, I could read them in Danish and in Asta’s deeply sloping but quite legible hand:

When I went out this morning a woman asked me if there were polar bears in the streets of Copenhagen …

Reading the original brought me a little shiver. I turned the pages, wondering now how Cary meant to deal with the language problem. I could show her the translation but she didn’t want that. Anyone could read the translation in the published diaries—or could they? Was she implying that not only the diaries themselves but the original translation might contain revelations omitted in the published text? Perhaps.

July 18th, July 21st, July 26th … Not all the writing was easily legible to me, much of the Danish was incomprehensible. I turned the page and deciphered the piece about the boys changing their names, the point where Asta abruptly comes to a stop: ‘there are four boys in Mogens’ class called Kenneth. I said they must ask their father, which is a sure way of postponing things for months.’ It’s easy enough to read a familiar foreign language when you know what to expect.

I expected no more until August 30th. In the published diaries Swanny’s birth was written about as imminent, then five weeks later, as having satisfactorily taken place. I had assumed, as I suppose all her readers had, that Asta had been too occupied or even too unwell to make diary entries during those weeks.

But it was not so.

Some five or six pages from the notebook had been torn out. These were the pages that came between July 26th and August 30th and including, it seemed, a few more sentences after ‘postponing things for months’. I have said ‘five or six’ but now I counted them, I counted the stubs. There were precisely five; ten, if you take into account that Asta wrote on both sides of the page; getting on for two thousand words when you calculate that she wrote between ten and twelve words to a line and there were twenty-five lines to each page.

Swanny must have torn those pages out. But perhaps she had done so only after the translation had been made. I was in the United States at the time she found the diaries, but this had its advantages for me now. She had written to me, at length and often, and I had kept her letters. I didn’t have to rely on my own memory. Somewhere in those letters there might be a mention of lost pages, though I couldn’t recall it. I certainly couldn’t recall her making any great revelation at that time, beyond the finding of the diaries and the realization of their worth.

At any rate I could look at the translation now. There might be no mystery or only a small one. This could be discretion on Swanny’s part, not secrecy. I put the 1905-1914 diaries back in the cabinet, with the exception of the first one, and took it downstairs to compare it with the translation.

Swanny’s neatness and method made all these investigations easier than they might have been. The translations in typescript were in the bottom drawer, the deepest one, of the desk in the study that had been Torben’s. They had been placed there in chronological order, each in its own cardboard folder, untitled but with the dates and the translator’s name.

I opened the first one.

When I went out this morning a woman asked me if there were polar bears in the streets of Copenhagen …

July 18th, July 21st, July 26th, and those lines that marked the end of that day’s entry: …
there are four boys in Mogens’ class called Kenneth. I said they must ask their father, which is a sure way of postponing things for months.
The next entry was August 30th.

Cary was already there when I got to our meeting place, the Hollybush on Holly Mount. She had lost weight and was looking smart in High Street jeans and a pink tweed jacket from someone grand, probably Ralph Lauren. Cary’s hair is always a different colour. She told me, not then but the next time we met, that she had forgotten what its natural colour was and now, when she scrutinized her parting, she saw that it was white. On this evening her hair was the colour Asta called ‘plain’ and later generations call ‘dark’ chocolate.

Before the rift we’d been in the habit of kissing. I’ve never been a hand-shaker. We looked at each other, assessing what time had done.

‘You’re looking well.’

‘So are you.’

‘Would you think it awful if I said we could each have a glass of champagne?’

We had it. ‘You’re going to be disappointed,’ I said, ‘or I think you are. There’s a big gap where your information might be. I’ll show you. We’ll go back to Swanny’s house and I’ll show you. Tell me about your murder.’

‘You mustn’t think of it as an ordinary sordid case.’

‘I’m not thinking of it at all,’ I said. ‘I’d never heard of Roper till you mentioned him.’

‘It’s not a series we’re planning but a three-part
serial.
You see, the story’s not so much sensational as tragic. I’m fictionalizing it but only to fill in a few details. There are huge gaps. There’s a missing child. And then Asta mentioned Roper in the diaries.’

By this time I had found it, a single mention. It was in the entry for June 2nd, 1913, when Asta speculates that Rasmus might think her as bad a woman as Mrs Roper. ‘Only once,’ I said. ‘Who was he, this Roper?’

‘He was a chemist, he lived in Hackney. I mean he was a pharmacist, I suppose you’d call it. He murdered his wife or they said he did. That was in 1905.’

‘And this happened near where my grandparents lived?’

‘They found the body in a house in Navarino Road, Hackney, and brought Roper back, he was in Cambridge with his son. It was a terribly hot summer, a hundred and thirty degrees, so they said, though I can hardly believe it, and there were a lot of murders brought on by the heat. There was a terrible lot of violence. I’ve been reading the newspapers for July and August that year. But you ought to read about it in
Famous Trials
, I’ve got a copy you can have. It’s good as far as it goes, only it doesn’t go as far as I want.’

I said it was time to go to the house and see, but she wouldn’t find anything in the diaries.

‘Oh, but you can’t be sure!’

‘I’m sure.’

It was dusk outside by then. The air is always clear up there and fresh like the country, in spite of the long line of cars that winds its slow way up Heath Street until past nightfall. We walked across Streatley Place and New End, under the gleaming lamps and through the dark spaces to Willow Road.

‘Are you going to come and live here?’ she said.

‘I shouldn’t think so, not for a moment. It’s too big for one person on her own.’

I sensed the discomfort this gave her. She said rather brightly, ‘It’ll fetch a fortune.’

‘I know.’

We went in and it struck me at once that I should have brought the diaries, or at least the relevant one, downstairs. Was it possible that I had been too in awe of the
Asta
originals to disturb them? I determined that this time that first volume at least should come down with me.

Cary puffed up the stairs behind me, growing more and more breathless and sounding her smoker’s wheeze. She didn’t exactly hold Asta in reverence as a good many of her readers did but still she wanted to pause at the third floor and look inside that room. I had left the door wide open, not sharing Swanny’s passion for closing the door each time you leave a room and closing all of them before you leave the house.

What she saw inside seemed to disappoint her. She expected Asta’s domain to ‘look more like the diaries’, she said, without explaining what she meant. When we got to the top floor it seemed so dreary up there and so desolate among the trunks and boxes that I grabbed the bundle labelled 1905-1914 and handed it to Cary to take down while I carried 1915-1924 myself.

We sat in Swanny’s drawing room and must have been there for a good five minutes before I realized we hadn’t taken our coats off. This was a dwelling house, a home, and it was mine, though this was hard to realize, not a railway waiting room. I took off my coat and took hers and hung them up in the hall.

‘D’you want something to drink?’

She said, ‘Is there anything?’

‘I expect there’s wine. In her last years Swanny never drank anything but champagne. I don’t mean she drank much of that but when she drank it would have been champagne.’

‘Let’s see if there’s something to celebrate first.’

She was poring over the first notebook, touching the yellowed sheets quite reverently. Her face went quite blank when she came to the stubs where the five pages had been torn out. I hadn’t warned her, just let her find them for herself.

‘Who’s responsible for that?’

‘Swanny, I suppose. There are five pages gone.’

She said, ‘Was it at an interesting bit?’

‘I can’t help thinking they were torn out because it was getting too interesting.’

She asked me what I meant.

‘Too personal. Too near the bone, if you like.’ I wasn’t going to tell her. ‘Nothing to do with your murder.’

She shrugged. ‘Does it happen anywhere else? I mean, are there other places in the diaries, maybe in the other ten-year sets, where she’s torn chunks out?’

‘We could look.’

So we went through the two bundles we had and found all the notebooks intact. Cary thought she was really on to something, had had a spectacular brainwave, when the idea came to her that the pages from the notebook had been removed
after
the translations had been made.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought of that. What you see there is what was translated.’

‘So what we’re saying is that Swanny Kjær tore out the pages in her mother’s diary where reference was made to something personally unacceptable to
her.
’

‘Wouldn’t we all do the same? Most of us aren’t put to the test. We don’t have mothers who wrote bestselling diaries. Haven’t you anything in your life you wouldn’t want exposed in what amounts to someone else’s autobiography?’

She wouldn’t catch my eye. She must have know what I implied but she wouldn’t look at me or give any sign.

‘In most cases,’ I said, ‘I imagine you don’t know you’re mentioned until you read the autobiography and then it must come as a shock. Let’s say Swanny was in the position to edit someone else’s autobiography and she did edit it—to her advantage.’

‘She censored it, for Christ’s sake,’ said Cary. ‘She’d no business to tamper with it like that.’

I didn’t like her finding fault with Swanny. It was because
she
was doing it. I would have overlooked it from anyone else. Gordon Westerby, for instance, he could have said it and I’d have let it past. But this was Cary Oliver. I repeated what I’d said about there being nothing there on the Roper murder. Why would Swanny want to hide significant details of an ancient crime? What was it to her?

‘Can we go through the other diaries?’ Cary asked.

We went back up all those stairs and took out 1925-1934 and 1935-1944 and so on. In none of them were there any torn-out pages until we got to 1954, where a single sheet was missing. I struggled with the Danish and realized this must be where Asta was writing about Hansine’s death.

‘Let’s have the champagne,’ I said.

She raised her glass and said, ‘Here’s to the future editor of
Asta.
’

‘I don’t know if I shall be. The diaries aren’t all translated, you know.’

‘Why would Swanny Kjær tear out stuff from 1954? I mean wasn’t she already quite ancient by then? All passion spent and all that?’

I couldn’t resist it. ‘She was the same age as you are now, Cary.’

Cary didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I thought how it was no concern of hers anyhow. She was interested in the Roper murders and by 1954 the last Roper had been long dead. She repeated what she’d said on the phone.