Asta's Book (19 page)

‘Have you forgiven me?’

That made me laugh, though it wasn’t funny. ‘Asta once said to me that she thought we ought to forgive people,’ I said, ‘but not too soon.’

‘It isn’t too soon, is it? It’s fifteen years. And I’m sorry, Ann.’

‘You’re sorry because it didn’t work out, not because you—how shall I put it?—intervened. Intervened and pinched my lover.’

She said very softly, ‘I am sorry.’

‘I don’t think I’d want Daniel now, anyway,’ I said carefully. ‘Not in any circumstances, not the way things are and not if he’d gone on living with me instead of you.’

‘You were going to marry him. That’s what he said.’

‘I wonder if I ever would have. I’ve never been married.’ I looked hard at her, the jeans that were too tight, the stomach that stuck out, the double track of tendons that led from chin to throat to neck. I looked at her and was glad there was no mirror in the room for me to look at myself. ‘We’re too old for lovers now,’ I said.

‘Oh, Ann, what a terrible thing to say!’

‘All passion spent. Your words, I think. Have some more champagne.’

She giggled. It was from nervousness and understandable, but it still seemed misplaced. I wished then that I was the sort of woman who could have reached out and touched her hand. Or even put my arms round her. But I no longer liked her, I had ceased to like her long ago, and I was sure she must dislike me, the way we do dislike people we have injured.

Instead of that gentle touch, I spoke to her. ‘You can borrow the diary translations if you want to. There may be something in them that never found its way into print.’

She said, ‘Thanks,’ in a thick slurry voice.

I remembered then that she wasn’t very good with wine and knew I shouldn’t give her any more. Her face was puffed up and curiously shiny. There weren’t enough lights on in Swanny’s drawing room and the warm, golden, intimate atmosphere seemed terribly at odds with us and what we’d talked of. I switched on the central chandelier and set it blazing. Cary blinked and gave a shiver.

‘I’ll take the translations,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll go. I’ll give you the account of the Roper case and one of the trial and some more stuff I’ve unearthed on separate sheets.’ She bent right over to take them out of her briefcase and I could hear – or I could sense—the strumming of the blood in her head. ‘Here.’ The hand she extended to me trembled a very little.

I knew then that what had upset her wasn’t my non-forgiveness or her memories of Daniel Blain or her embarrassment at the subject coming up at all, none of those things. She was upset because I’d said we were too old to have lovers. It wasn’t true, of course, one is probably never too old and we were still in our forties, but I had said it and cut her to the quick. I couldn’t help it then, I felt desperately sorry for her, something I’d thought I’d never feel.

‘Let’s forget it, Cary. We’ll never talk of it again. All over, OK?’

‘Please,’ she said and brightened almost at once, was all smiles, hugging the folders full of translations to her as if they were her lost love letters. She could always astound me with her changes of subject. ‘What do you think she did with the pages she tore out?’

‘What?’

‘Your aunt. We’re saying she tore them out because there were things in them she didn’t want people to see after she was dead.’

I supposed we were. It just didn’t sound like Swanny, the way I remembered her. ‘So?’

‘Would she have thrown them away? I wouldn’t think so. She’d have hidden them somewhere.’

I could imagine being there all night while Cary and I searched Swanny’s house for this kind of treasure trove. Or, rather, I couldn’t imagine it. She and I weren’t talking about the same people. But after she had gone, uttering promises to see me soon, after we had found a taxi for her, and I had retreated into the warm, shiny, empty house, I sat down with the last of the champagne and thought about what she’d said. No doubt I thought about it to stop thinking of Daniel Blain whom I used to describe to myself in a dramatic inner voice as the only man I’d ever loved.

Did I want to know who Swanny really was? Did I care? Not as she had done, of course, but, yes, I was curious. And by now there were more questions to be answered. Not only who was Swanny, but did she find out who she was before she died? Was it in those missing five pages for July and August 1905 and was there also included some vital fact relevant to the Roper case?

Too late I realized Cary hadn’t told me if Roper was hanged or acquitted and I hadn’t asked.

11

November 7th, 1913

IGAAR FLYTTEDE VI
ind i vores nye Hus, Rasmus og jeg, Mogens, Knud, Swanny og Marie, Hansine og Emily. Aah ja, og selvfølgelig Bjørn. Der er nok Soveværelser til Børnene, saa de kan have hver sit, og Hansine og Emily oppe i Loftet, saa de behøver ikke mere at dele Værelse. Men Hansine er slet ikke tilfreds med det. Hun er bekymret for, at hendes Cropper ikke vil tage hele Turen fra Homerton, eller hvor det nu er, at han bor.

Yesterday we moved into our new house, Rasmus and I, Mogens, Knud, Swanny and Marie, Hansine and Emily. Oh, and Bjørn, of course. There are enough bedrooms for the children to have one each and Hansine and Emily, up in the attics, don’t have to share any more. Not that Hansine is at all pleased. She’s worried that her Cropper won’t want to make the journey all the way from Homerton, or wherever it is he lives.

Everywhere is a mess, the new carpets haven’t come and our furniture looks very shabby in these fine rooms. I left it all and went out this morning, exploring my new terrain. The air is strong and fresh up here, breathing it is like tossing off a glass of very cold
snaps.
From our back windows you can look down over the whole of London and see the River Thames sparkling in the sun, but outdoors you really feel in the country with the woods here and the windy hilltops.

I walked through the woods to Muswell Hill and down to Hornsey, I walked for miles. I found Alexandra Palace like an enormous greenhouse and I found the station where the trains run that go up there and down to London. Since I’ve been in this country I haven’t been in trains much but I shall go in them now and I shall walk on to Hampstead Heath.

When I got back Rasmus wanted to know where I’d been and how could I go out enjoying myself when there was so much to be done at home. Well, I’m back now, I said, what shall I do? So we went out in one of the motor cars to buy furniture and then he showed me the big shop he’s taken in the Archway Road to sell his ‘automobiles’.

December 12th, 1913

I have got my fur coat. Rasmus has given it to me for Christmas, two weeks in advance.

When I look back in these diaries, as I sometimes do, and read the things I’ve written I see myself as a thoroughly bad wife, a wife who seems to hate her husband. And I’m often sorry for myself, I’m a real self-pitier. They say—or someone said—that the important thing in life is to know yourself. Well, keeping a diary teaches you to know yourself. But does it teach you to improve? Probably not. One is oneself. People don’t change except when they’re very young. They make stupid New Year Resolutions to be different and keep to them for two days. The truth is they
can’t.
Even a great tragedy coming into your life doesn’t change you much, though it may make you harder.

When I got the fur coat I was bitterly disappointed. It reminded me of something that happened when I was a child. Someone had given me a paintbox, it may have been Tante Frederikke, and I was quite fond of painting pictures. My father promised to get me a palette and I formed a picture in my mind of what this thing was going to be. I’d seen one in a painting of an artist. The funny thing was that the artist in the painting was a woman, and that must be pretty well unheard-of, a woman being a painter and getting well-known for it. She was French, this one, and called Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun and with red hair like me. In the painting she was holding a brush in one hand and a big oval palette with a hole for her thumb. Paint in all sorts of colours was daubed on it and I imagined myself holding something like it and looking like that. But when Far gave me his present it wasn’t my idea of a palette at all but a little square sheet of metal with a handle sticking out.

I’ve never forgotten that and of course it came back when Rasmus gave me the coat. Dark brown skunk, a long way from that dream of mine of Persian lamb trimmed with white fox, as far removed as that bit of metal was from the beautiful oval palette. My face must have shown him how I felt. I put it on to please him and he said it was a good fit.

‘Don’t you like it?’ he said. ‘I thought you wanted a fur coat.’

I didn’t answer him. Instead I said, ‘Do you think I’ve been very unkind and ungrateful in all our years? Have I been too hard and sharp and critical for you, Rasmus?’

He didn’t think I was sincere. He thought I was getting at him in some way. I could see his crafty look. ‘I don’t try to understand women,’ he said. ‘They’re a mystery. Any man will tell you.’

‘No, you tell me. Have you had enough of me? If you could, would you be rid of me?’

What was I hoping for? What could I hope for? And what on earth did I think he’d say?

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘I thought we could talk about it.’

‘We are talking,’ he said, ‘and much good it’ll do us. If all this is because you don’t like the coat I can change it.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘don’t bother. It’ll be fine.’

December 18th, 1913

It’s a strange thing now, when a name comes into your mind and you think about it, that same name keeps coming up throughout the day. I hadn’t thought of Vigée-Lebrun for years until she came back to me when I remembered the affair of the palette. She was there in my head when I took the children to the National Gallery and suddenly I saw her self-portrait on the wall in front of us. There she was with her pale red hair and the dress and hat to match her hair, her thumb hooked through the famous palette, the kind
I
wanted, and a bunch of brushes in her hand.

Dear little Swanny looked up into my face and said, ‘That lady looks like you,
lille Mor.
’

Of course the boys had to spoil it by saying it was
I
looked like the lady because the lady came first and Marie said Mor didn’t have earrings like pink tears (her words), but I suppose I do look a bit like Mme Vigée.

Then, in the afternoon, I was in the library—I’m determined to read English books as well as my Danish favourites—when what should I see on the shelves but a book about Vigée Lebrun in the Masterpieces in Colour series, this one by a man with the very fancy name of Haldane MacFall. Of course I took it out and I’ve been reading it and looking at the pictures of Marie Antoinette, sad pictures because the poor queen was executed. I was glad to discover that Mme Vigée escaped the guillotine by getting out of France before the worst of it started.

That led to another train of thought. One always thinks of France as being the only country to have a guillotine but this isn’t so. The Swedes had one and have one now, but they’ve only used it once. My cousin Sigrid told me that in the street next to them in Stockholm there lived a man who was condemned to death for murdering a woman. It was a strange story. He was married but he and his wife had no children and they desperately wanted a child. It must have been the wife’s fault because he had a child by his mistress who lived up in Sollentuna. The mistress refused to give up the child, she wanted him to divorce his wife and marry her, but he loved the wife, so he murdered the mistress and took the child for himself and his wife to adopt.

They were going to guillotine him. He would have been the first person the Swedes had ever used their guillotine on, in the old days they used an axe, but somehow he got reprieved and was sent to prison for life instead. I think I’d rather have my head chopped off!

Eventually they used their guillotine, once and once only, just three years ago. Who knows? There may be someone else who will one day get his head sliced off. If a man commits a murder he deserves death, say I.

December 27th, 1913

Our first Christmas in the new house. We had a Christmas tree six feet high and I decorated it all in white and silver, no colours, just the pure brightness of snow and frost. Rasmus has decreed that now we are in our own house that we own and are real ‘Britishers’, we must have an English Christmas which means in fact that we have two: a dinner on Christmas Eve and another one on Christmas Day with presents in the morning.

He’s always hated dressing up as Father Christmas, so Mogens did it for the first time this year and now he always will, he says. ‘You won’t always be here,’ I said, ‘you’ll have a home of your own and children of your own.’ That’s something I can really believe when I see how tall he is and realize he’ll be sixteen next month.

The girls of course wouldn’t go to sleep, they’d eaten all that rich food and they were waiting for Father Christmas. Rasmus would never have had the patience to wait until they were asleep before filling their stockings, but Mogens did. He sat on the top of the stairs in his red coat and hood with cotton wool stuck all over his face and he had to wait for hours. He said it was two o’clock before they closed their eyes and he could creep in with his sack.

I believe he would do anything for his sister Swanny, he loves her so and always has. Marie is just the baby for him and a bit of a nuisance but he adores Swanny. And so do I.

She came downstairs on Christmas morning and said as cool as you please, ‘Why didn’t you do Father Christmas this year, Far?’ That was the first we knew that she didn’t believe in him any more. I forget how old she is, I forget she’s eight and growing up and away from me. She put her arms round Mogens and kissed him and said he was her
Brother
Christmas.

Another
present from Rasmus. Money this time for me to buy clothes. Following dear little Swanny’s example, I went up to him and gave him a kiss. It’s hard to say who was the more surprised, me at getting the money or him at being kissed. I am becoming quite a saint. It must be due to getting all these things I want—or more or less what I want—a nice house and furniture and now this money. Well, whatever they say, happiness makes you better and suffering makes you worse.