Asta's Book (33 page)

Marriage can be a love affair, the only kind indeed respectable women are allowed. Once I thought mine would be but it never was, it was only a swift disillusionment and a long slow winding down.

It’s strange really, writing in Danish, knowing as I write this language which is closer to me than any other, is
my
language, the first I ever uttered—I still read my Dickens in Danish—that it is as secret as the writing Mogens used to do when he was a child. He and Knud found that if you dipped a pen in lemon juice and wrote something the words would be invisible until you heated the paper. Mine is more secret than that in a way because no matter how much the English held my diary in front of the fire they would never be able to read the words.

So I feel I can write without risk that sometimes when I look at a man like Cropper or at Mr Cline (who at least is a gentleman), handsome men, I feel a curious longing I can’t—or daren’t—define. I think to myself, if I lived in another world or at another time or in a dream, I might have you or you for my lover. But in this world I never can and never would.

Poor little Swanny has the German measles. When Rasmus heard he said he thought the war was over but apparently they’d started a counter-attack.

November 30th, 1919

Sergeant Duke came to see me today.

I expected him in time for tea but he was early. Swanny is still away from school with the German measles, so she answered the door when the bell rang. It was Hansine’s afternoon off. I was upstairs, getting dressed. Although I haven’t worn mourning for Mogens, I put on my black crêpe de Chine with the satin bands, it seemed more suitable and dignified. But then I asked myself what I was doing, making a false image of myself for this man, this ordinary working man who happened to be braver than most men. So I got back into my navy skirt and crocheted blouse. The only ornament I had was that butterfly brooch.

He is even better-looking than Cropper. Fair-haired, tall, a truly military figure. Why on earth had I expected him to be in uniform? The war is
over.
He was wearing a dark suit with a very high stiff collar and black tie. My first thought—it
would
be—was that I should have kept the black dress on.

I walked towards him and held out my hand. He took it in both his and that, for some reason, amazed me. I don’t usually notice the colour of people’s eyes, I can have known them for years and not be able to say what colour their eyes are, but I saw his. They’re not likely to be as highly coloured as mine! The colour of his registered with me before I even spoke. They are grey, not a uniform grey but full of tiny gleaming sparks, like granite.

He called me ‘madam’. He said, ‘Madam, it’s very good of you to ask me here,’ and then, ‘This dear young lady and I have been talking about her brother.’

I sent Swanny away. I had this premonition I’d be hearing things she shouldn’t hear. He wouldn’t sit down until I asked him to, he was very respectful, yet at the same time I felt this wasn’t a man with the soul of a servant. He belongs to himself, he’s no one else’s, just as I belong to myself.

Emily brought the tea things but I made the tea myself, using the brass spirit kettle. I usually only do this for special guests. He said I must excuse him for staring, he had expected an older lady, and he called me ‘madam’ again.

‘You must say “Mrs Westerby”,’ I said. ‘You’ve made yourself an important man, you have the highest honour any man can have. Will you show me your Victoria Cross?’

Imagine, he hadn’t it with him. He never wears it. I asked him if he’d known Mogens before the battle.

‘Moans?’ he said.

I suppose that was the first time I realized how absurd the name must sound to English ears. ‘Jack,’ I said. ‘Everyone called him Jack but his mother,’ and I explained about names in our family and the language differences and how hard it is to adjust when you come to a new country. He listened as if he really cared, I’m not used to men like that, most of them never listen to what women say. It was distracting us from the real business of the afternoon, all this conversation about names, and I had to bring it back.

I said, ‘Did you know him at all? I’d like to know how he was beforehand.’

‘Quite cheerful,’ he said. ‘He was a brave boy,’ and then he went on to say they’d known each other well and talked together a lot. It was finding out they lived so near each other in London that gave them a sort of bond. Mogens told him he’d lived in Hackney, and said precisely where, when we first came to this country in a hundred and five and the Sergeant said that was a coincidence too because he knew the district well and had had friends nearby at the same time.

I asked him to tell me about that day, July the 1st on the Somme, and he said, how much did I know? Colonel Perry wrote to me, I said, and told me Mogens had died instantly, not that I believed it.

‘I’d like you to tell me the truth about what happened that night.’

‘War’s not the way the people at home believed it was,’ he said. ‘If they knew there’d never be any more wars. It wouldn’t suit the politicians to let them know.’

‘What did you do?’ I said.

He’d been looking at me with those granite eyes but he turned them away. It was as if he were saying, I can face you when we talk of polite fictions but it’s not fitting for our eyes to meet when I tell you these truths. He said he went out into no man’s land to look for a young officer, a Second Lieutenant called Quigley, whose soldier servant while searching for him had been killed by stepping on a live grenade. But before he found Quigley he came upon one wounded man after another and each time he managed to bring them in. All this he told with absolute modesty and self-effacement, speaking of it as lightly as another man might of retrieving dead birds after a shoot.

Quigley, when he came upon him at dawn, was dead right up by the German wire, so he left him there and returned in full view of the enemy.

‘They never fired on me,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why not. Perhaps they couldn’t believe their eyes. I was looking at them and that’s why I nearly stumbled over Jack. I gave him a drink from my water bottle and then I picked him up in my arms but that was too much for them and they started firing on me and got me in the arm. It was another fellow a lot braver than me dragged us both in on a groundsheet.’

I would have given ten years of my life to have been able not to ask. But bargains like that can’t be made. Either you’re the sort of person who can hide from things or else you’re not. I’d rather be so unhappy I want to die, and see the facts and look them in the face, than delude myself. What Rasmus wants is his business, he can deceive himself if he chooses, I won’t even judge, but I’m responsible for what I am and what I do.

I asked, feeling so sick I could taste the tea I swallowed come up in my throat mixed up with bile, ‘Mogens was alive then, he was still alive.’

He said, ‘I could tell you what Colonel Perry told you.’

‘You tell me the truth.’

So he did. I can’t write it. I wanted to know and I got what I thought I wanted. Better get on quickly and not write that part. Mogens died two days later in the hospital on the Quai d’Escale in Le Havre.

The Sergeant expected me to cry. I didn’t. I don’t. I was thinking, this man tried to save my son’s life. Why? He wasn’t a relative, he hadn’t even known him long, yet he risked his own life to save Mogens. I will never understand people.

‘Will you come again?’ I said. ‘When we could talk about it together?’

He said he would. I didn’t really want to talk about it again, not ever again, but I want to talk to
him.
Am I mad? When he left I gave him my hand. He took it and brought it to his lips. No man has ever kissed my hand before.

18

SWANNY WIPED THEIR COVERS
with a damp cloth, stacked them in sets of ten, weighed these down with telephone directories and kept them in a warm place. Whether this is suitable treatment for old books that the damp has got to I don’t know but it seemed to work fairly well. By the time I got to them, when I went straight to Swanny on my return from America, she had read all the diaries, made a tentative translation of the early ones and had some inkling of their value.

I remember looking at those which she put into my hands as at objects rather than books. They smelt of mildew, in spite of being dried out. Their covers were spotted like a mosaic with ineradicable mould marks, a soft pinkish-grey marbling. Asta’s writing was clear enough if you read Danish and didn’t find her apparent dislike of starting new paragraphs an obstacle to decipherment. I picked up no more than a word here and there. Now I no longer remember which years I looked at, though I saw no stubs of torn-out pages. In any case, the first notebook wasn’t among them.

‘They were in the coach house,’ Swanny said, ‘on the shelves beside Torben’s
National Geographic.
I can see exactly what happened. It was that day when the gardener told me she tried to burn some books but his fire had gone out. She wouldn’t have wanted to take them all the way upstairs again, so she put them on the shelves down there and forgot about them.’

The copy in my hands looked so uninviting I wondered why Swanny had read them.

She looked a little shamefaced. ‘I caught sight of my own name.’

‘And you had to see what she said about you?’

‘I started reading, Ann, and I got caught up in it. It was like reading a novel. And not just like that, it was like reading
the
novel you’ve always wanted to read but have never been able to find. Does that make sense?’

It made more sense, though I didn’t say so, that, having seen her name, Swanny wanted to find out if her own origins were mentioned in this early diary. I could imagine a sick excitement possessing her as she saw that date, July 1905. She blushed. Perhaps I was looking at her too penetratingly.

‘I wasn’t sure if I ought to read them. I said to myself, if Mor intended to burn them it must have been because she didn’t want anyone else to read them. But that’s not certain, is it? There could be other motives. I’m sure there
were
other motives. In the first pages she says she doesn’t want Far to read them. Hansine couldn’t read. Jack and Ken and I used to be very tactful about that. But Mor says very little about not wanting people to know what she was writing, only that Danish is like a code. I thought, suppose she meant to burn them because she thought people might laugh at her? Suppose she thought they’d be found after she was dead and people—I mean, you and me, I suppose—would just find them ridiculous.’

It didn’t sound like Mormor, who had never much cared what anyone thought of her. A more likely reason for an intention to destroy the diaries seemed that she simply had no more use for them, they were finished, done with, actually as well as metaphorically a closed book. She had always hated clutter. Acquisitiveness bored her and so did sentimentality. She kept her diaries because she was a natural writer, she set down her days’ events for the reason I suppose most diarists do, for therapy, for the unburdening of the soul. Every day such writers are on the analyst’s couch. They are indifferent to the verdict of posterity.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Swanny said, mightily relieved. She had to justify her behaviour, she had to excuse what might be an intrusion into her dead mother’s privacy. ‘That would have been just like her. You remember how she used to get rid of her clothes. When she moved here she sold nearly all her furniture, though God knows we had room for it. She just dumped the diaries because they cluttered the place up. She can’t have dreamed of possible future publication.’

‘Publication?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, Ann, why not?’

‘All sorts of reasons. It’s not easy to get things published.’

‘Oh, I meant privately. I’m quite well-off, you know. I could afford it.’ She looked at me wistfully. ‘A few hundred copies, say?’

I began to tell her how expensive it would be, how publishing a book doesn’t just mean printing it and putting a jacket on finished copies but sales, distribution, publicity, promotion, advertising. She interrupted me, she hadn’t been listening.

‘I’ve found a real translator. It was really rather clever of me. I went to the High Hill Bookshop and looked at all the novels they had until I found one translated from the Danish. They only had one. The translator was a woman called Margrethe Cooper and I guessed she must be a Dane married to an Englishman which in fact turned out to be the case. I wrote to her care of the publishers and asked her to translate the first diary for me and she said she would and she’s doing it now. That’s why the first one’s not there, the one that starts before I was born.’

Not a word about revelations. She was looking limpidly at me, her face open and frank, the way in fact the Westerby women did look when they had most to hide. There was no anxiety in her face, no stress. She looked happier than she had before I went away. She looked younger. It was then that I understood I shouldn’t discourage her in this apparently extravagant venture. It was doing her good, it was giving her an interest. Perhaps too she thought it would give her the answer.

I stayed with her for two weeks. Whatever clearing out she had done, by then everything was back in place. When I asked her if she had thought any more about selling the house she looked at me incredulously. She seemed almost affronted and I realized that the idea had passed from her mind as if it had never been. She talked a lot about Asta, said she still fancied she heard her footstep on the stair and heard her voice saying, ‘Do I smell the good coffee?’ I was invited to put my face inside a drawer in her room and experience the Asta scent. But not a word did she say about her own origins or that quest to know which at one time had been an obsession.

If it cost a lot to publish the diaries, she said one day, it would be the money Asta herself left that she’d be spending. But she smiled as if entirely comforted and no more was said about doubting if she had a right to inherit from her mother.

I went home to the place I had then in West Hampstead, bracing myself to face up to ghosts of Daniel’s presence. Resolving to sell it and move, to do what Swanny had decided not to do, helped to exorcise them. I could tell myself, I shan’t be here long, I don’t have to get used to it.