Asta's Book (45 page)

‘Why would she have told?’

‘People find secrets a burden and as they get older they seem to weigh more heavily on them. Also, I suppose, my mother and grandmother scarcely ever saw your family. My grandmother would have thought them quite remote from my mother—she didn’t know her or she didn’t know her in that respect. You can imagine it coming up in a discussion about adopting babies and my grandmother saying it used to be easier than it is now, all you had to do was find an unwanted baby and take it on the way Mrs Westerby did.’

‘I wonder if that was the reason Asta kept away from your family,’ I said. ‘In the diaries there’s a bit about Asta refusing to ask your grandmother to her Golden Wedding dinner. I thought it was plain snobbery but now I’m not so sure.’

‘It all goes to show,’ Paul said, ‘that the way babies are adopted these days is better. Better do it through the courts all shipshape and Bristol fashion. Still, we shan’t be adopting any babies, shall we?’

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

Paul and I went together to a private screening of
Roper.
The press weren’t there, it was mostly BAFTA members, but Cary was present of course and Miles Sinclair and the actor who played Roper and the actress who played Florence Fisher.

We had a drink in the bar with Cary first. She was looking very handsome and pleased with herself, wearing a Chanel suit she mysteriously said had been bought for her in the January sales but had still cost over a thousand pounds. I asked her if she was pleased with the production.

‘I’m very pleased, absolutely thrilled in fact. But, you know, it turned into an investigation too—well, you know it did, Ann. I thought I was going to find out whodunnit and I haven’t done that.’

‘Did you expect to after eighty-five years?’ Paul asked her.

‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m such a fool sometimes. I suppose I thought the truth would emerge.’

She gave us each a leaflet with a cast list and a photograph of Clara Salaman as Lizzie standing under a gas lamp. It was quite a big cast, the Roper family and Florence, the lovers, various policemen, the judge and counsel, Florence’s boyfriend, cab drivers, shopkeepers, the railway porter and Roper’s sister and brother-in-law. I was curious about Edith and saw she was played by twin sisters. They have to do that because of the law about the short periods of time very young children are permitted to act.

We went into the auditorium and it started promptly at half-past six but first Cary got up on the stage and said she’d like the audience to see the two people who had made this possible, the scriptwriter and the director. She asked them to stand up, which they did a bit sheepishly. Miles Sinclair was a huge man with a bushy grey beard. He was sitting next to Cary, very closely next to her, and when the lights went down he slid his arm along the back of her seat. I wondered if he was the purchaser of the Chanel suit.

What can I say of
Roper?

It was very good, it was entertaining, in fact it was enthralling. It wasn’t cheaply or sensationally made but subtly, almost intellectually and with real feeling for the time in which it was set. I’m sure there were no anachronisms. Anyway, just as they have read Asta’s diaries, so many people reading this will have seen
Roper.
I need not describe it. The difficulty with it was, for me, that it came nowhere near the pictures of life in Devon Villa, Navarino Road, that I had involuntarily formed for myself from what I’d read. The actors didn’t look like the Ropers and the house wasn’t like Maria Hyde’s house. There hung over it, I felt all the time I was watching, the ghosts of the many and various television productions concerned with Jack the Ripper which must haunt all producers of crime drama set in London at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.

We never saw the murder committed, only dead Lizzie with her throat cut. No doubt it was my own fault that I constantly expected to see a dreadful figure with a bloody knife appear out of an alley. Needless to say, nothing like that happened. Cary and her scriptwriter had had no solution to offer, though we were left feeling, as readers of Ward-Carpenter and Mockridge must be left feeling, that Roper probably did kill his wife and got away with it.

Cary had read Arthur Roper’s memoir and the letters between Roper and his sister from the Ward-Carpenter collection as well as the contemporary newspaper accounts of the trial. The information she had got enabled her to bring in a few more characters but scarcely more enlightenment. Still, I’d enjoyed it and I told her so. Paul said he hoped it would put up the price of his house when he came to sell it. I was about to say that was the first I’d heard of his selling his house but by then Cary was introducing us to Miles Sinclair and in a way that left no doubt of their relationship.

I was glad for her. Two or three years ago, if anyone had told me I’d be pleased to see Cary Oliver happy I’d have thought them mad, but I was glad. We made an arrangement to meet and all have dinner together. Miles Sinclair wrote his phone number down on one of the leaflets with the cast list—I gathered that Cary was more often to be found at his place than her own—and I folded it up and put it in my pocket.

‘You never said anything to me about selling your house,’ I said on the way back to Hampstead.

‘It was a spontaneous decision.’

‘Where are you going?’ I was for a moment breathless with terror.

‘It’ll take a long time to sell. It’ll take a year.’

‘But where are you going?’

‘I thought Willow Road in Hampstead. If you’ll have me.’

I had forgotten about Lisa Waring. When Cary mentioned the name I had to ask who she meant. The planned dinner with her and Miles had taken place and we were all having our coffee when, quite suddenly, she said Lisa Waring had phoned her. She was here, staying ‘just round the corner’ from Cary’s office in Frith Street. Cary spoke as if this made it worse, as if it confirmed her as some sort of spy or nemesis figure, though she still knew no more than she had of what Lisa Waring had to show.

‘When are you seeing her?’ I said.

‘Wednesday morning. You’ll be there, won’t you? You promised to be there.’

Miles gave her an indulgent look, as at an excitable child, but I wasn’t very pleased. Wednesday wasn’t particularly convenient. Still, it’s always easier not to cross Cary, something on which she has built a successful career. Crossing her leads to public scenes, wild accusations, tears and other dramas. She took hold of my hand.

‘I have to have you there in case she destroys me.’

Lisa Waring didn’t look capable of destroying anything larger than a beetle. One of these creatures, scuttling across the floor of Cary’s ancient dirty Soho office, she trod on with precise deliberation as she was shown in. She trod on it, pushed the resulting squashed mess aside with the toe of a black running shoe and asked if it was true Mozart had stayed in the house next door when he came to London as a child.

Having stopped smoking a week or so before, Cary had taken it up again, lighting a fresh cigarette as the girl came in to announce her visitor. The atmosphere in the little room was blue with smoke. Cary’s voice came out very hoarsely, she had to cough to clear her throat and then she couldn’t stop coughing. At last she managed to say that where Mozart had lived was now the entrance to the London Casino. Lisa Waring nodded in a sage way.

It was obvious she had no documents with her. She didn’t even have a handbag, only a coat with pockets over her jeans and sweater. She looked to be in her late twenties, small, sallow, black-haired and with enough of a tilt to the eyes to show that one of those ancestors had been an oriental. I remembered, in that moment, that it was she who wanted something from Cary, not that she had something to impart to Cary or even threaten her with. Somehow we’d overlooked that, or Cary had, seeing her as a menace, almost as a blackmailer.

And now she sat in silence, looking from one to the other of us as Cary introduced me, then casting down her eyes.

‘What exactly do you want to know?’ Cary said.

‘About my ancestor. My father’s grandfather. Where he came from, who he was.’

I’m sure Cary was thinking as I was then, that it was easy enough to find out. Alfred Roper’s life was well-documented, as we both knew. This girl was probably like one of those students that were Paul’s despair, the kind that, in spite of training, teaching and advice, have no idea about research, where to find a source, how to go about it, where to look anything up, and anyway always prefer to get others to do it for them.

She dispelled that fast. ‘I can’t. I’ve done my best. I’ve never come across the name anywhere until I saw it in your cast list.’

I suppose that’s what gave me a hint we were talking at cross-purposes. ‘You’re not thinking about Roper at all, are you?’

Of course I’d put that badly. She looked puzzled. ‘That’s the name of your production, yes. I know that. It’s my great-grandfather I’m interested in. His name was George Ironsmith and I want to know if it’s the same one.’

26

I TRIED TO REMEMBER
who George Ironsmith was. The name was in the cast list on Cary’s leaflets, one of which lay on her desk. I looked at it and—ah, yes, Lizzie’s erstwhile fiancé, the one who gave her the ring with a glass stone. Cary produced photocopies of the Ward-Carpenter account and of Arthur Roper’s memoir and Cora Green’s story for the
Star.
She passed them across the desk and Lisa Waring looked at them, took a pen, said ‘May I?’ and started underlining words or names.

‘A George Ironsmith was this lady’s lover, right?’

‘Apparently,’ Cary said. ‘He was engaged to her in 1895 but the engagement was broken and he went abroad.’

‘Abroad where?’

‘I’ve no idea. Cora Green says he had a “Colonial” accent, whatever that means.’

Whatever it did, Lisa Waring didn’t look too pleased. ‘How old was he?’

‘At the time of the murder? Maybe between thirty and forty. For the production we made him about that. The actor who plays him is thirty-six.’

‘My great-grandfather George Ironsmith was forty-nine when he died in 1920, I’ve seen his tombstone. He was born in 1871 and that would have made him thirty-four in 1905.’

Cary was immensely relieved. ‘It looks as if it’s him, doesn’t it?’

‘How can I find where he came from?’

Cary suggested looking through phone books for the whole country. Each of us recommended the records at St Catherine’s House. I told her how to go about this kind of research and that she could probably pursue her ancestors back through
The Mormon’s World
listing of parish baptismal records. I suppose I was disappointed. What I’d wanted was a revelation that was exciting but not calculated to upset Cary’s reconstruction.

But Cary was relieved. Like many people, when a burden is lifted off her back she becomes expansive. If Lisa Waring had told her, for instance (I’m fantasizing), that her great-grandfather was Arthur Roper, and he had once worked as a surgeon’s assistant and had been in London on July 28th, 1905, the last thing she would have done was agree to her request to ‘see the movie’. She hadn’t told her that, but rather that she was probably descended from a minor character in the drama, so Cary promised to send her the three
Roper
cassettes.

Cary expressed her relief after Lisa Waring had gone by leaping up and hugging me and offering to take me for ‘a wonderful lunch somewhere’. It was over this lunch, which became protracted and swallowed half the afternoon, that she asked me something she said she had been wanting to ask me about for some time. What made me connect Asta’s household with the Ropers at all?

‘You connected them,’ I said. ‘That was what put you in touch with me in the first place. You wanted to know if there were any more references to Roper in the diaries and then we found Swanny had torn out those pages. It was you, not me.’

‘Yes, but I stopped making the connection when we found those pages were missing. Without any further references, which may or may not have been there, we don’t know and never shall. All you have is the link of Hansine coming across Dzerjinski dying on the pavement and the two or three references Asta makes.’

‘Six,’ I said. ‘There are six. And I know them by heart. The first one is when she writes about Hansine and Dzerjinski, the second when Hansine asks if she can have Florence Fisher to tea and the third when Asta goes to Navarino Road and by chance sees Lizzie Roper come out of the house with Edith. That’s when she says Edith is pretty and fairy-like and she has that odd experience of sensing that Edith makes some sort of telepathic contact with her unborn child. Then she refers to ‘the man who murdered his wife in Navarino Road’ without naming him. The fourth one is just what anyone might say, that is anyone who happened to be keeping a diary and lived nearby. It would have been odder if she’d left it out. The only reference that’s a bit strange is the fifth one because she makes it eight years later in 1913. It’s when Rasmus thinks Sam Cropper is an admirer of hers and she goes on to say that he ‘thought I was following in the footsteps of Mrs Roper’. Then, in one of the last notebooks, she records reading about the Moors Murders and it reminds her of ‘that business in Navarino Road’.

‘You mean it indicates that she had Lizzie Roper on her mind?’

‘In a way. Of course it could be no more than that Asta had never come across any other woman that she’d have called a “bad” woman.’

‘Lizzie could have been the only one she knew and we have to remember she’d actually seen Lizzie. Doesn’t she refer to her big showy hat? Women like Asta, that is, “good” women, were often fascinated by the other sort and that could account for her thinking of Lizzie after so long. But all this goes to show that there’s no real connection between Asta’s family and Devon Villa.
I
put it in your mind and it didn’t go away after we’d found those pages were lost.’

‘Surely because whatever it is may have been in those pages.’

‘But we don’t know it was. All we know is that Swanny Kjær found a clue to her own origins in those pages and the truth, whatever it was, wasn’t acceptable to her, so she tore them out. Oh, Ann, I’m so happy that horrid little girl—she was horrid, wasn’t she, so cold?—I’m so happy she didn’t come to tell me her great-grandfather was Arthur Roper and he’d written a murder confession on his deathbed!’