Asta's Book (43 page)

No, but she may have passed it on to her daughter. I had got no further than this, had come to a dead end with this, though turning it over and over in my mind, when Paul phoned. It was evening by then and I was back with the proofs, laboriously inking in the printers’ marks from the guide in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He phoned to tell me his mother had died. She died a few minutes before he arrived at the hospital.

24

June 4th, 1947

DET ER NØJAGTIG
femten Aar siden idag, at vi maatte tage fra Padanaram og komme hertil. Jeg skrev ikke Datoen ned nogen Steder, men jeg kan huske den. Hvis jeg var den Slags Kvinde, der er dramatisk anlagt, saa vilde jeg sige, at den var skrevet i mit Hjerte.

It is exactly fifteen years today since we had to leave Padanaram and come here. I didn’t write the date down anywhere but I remember it. If I was the kind of woman who went in for drama, I’d say it was written on my heart.

It’s quite a strange coincidence that when Marie came to tea this afternoon she told me she intends to give her Padanaram to Ann for a seventh birthday present. I think her birthday’s in December, I must look it up. I loved that house, the big one I mean, not the silly thing Rasmus made and which made me so angry that it wasn’t for Swanny. ‘Ninety-eight’ isn’t so bad but the district is shabby and it reminds me more and more of those days long gone by in Lavender Grove.

I was glad Marie didn’t mention
her
Padanaram in front of Swanny but got all that out of the way before Swanny arrived. Perhaps I’m wrong but I still have this feeling she was hurt by the way Rasmus rejected her. The funny thing is he’s charming to her now and spends as much time in her house boring Torben with his tales of being swindled as he does in Marie’s. Silly old man! No doubt it would be a different story if Swanny had married a poor man and lived down the road in Hornsey.

All those years since the business failed and Westerby Autos was no more and still he goes on every day, day after day, about who stole this and that from him, who did him down and where he might be today if people hadn’t treated him so basely. I wonder if he knows what he looks like, setting off in a stiff collar and a homburg hat, still wearing
spats
, sitting high up there in that old Fiat, the old black box. Yet, can even a woman as hard as I am escape the curse of tenderness? If he’s an old fool I’m a sentimental old woman. I look at him and remember—one or two things. A hundred years ago. I remember that night he came back, though not what I wrote. I know it wasn’t quite true what I wrote, it wasn’t quite like that. But it’s no use pretending I care for him. I don’t.

The girls came to talk about this Golden Wedding party they are giving us at Frascati’s. What a lot of bosh it all is! For one thing, there will be no nice food, there isn’t any. I think it’s worse now than when the war was on. All that restaurants can find to serve is vol-au-vents and blancmange. Vol-au-vents filled up with vegetables in tinned soup is what it tastes like and probably what it is. But never mind the meal, we know that will be bad. The guest list is going to cause trouble, I can see it coming.

I will
not
have Hansine invited. What an idea! It comes from Marie, of course. ‘All those snobbish ideas have gone since the war, Mor,’ she says to me. It isn’t snobbery, though I don’t tell her that. Anyway, Joan Cropper married a man with a good job and a good salary, they live in a much better house than ‘98’ and Hansine’s been living with them since Sam died. You could say she’d come up in the world more than she can ever have dreamed of and we’ve gone down. But the fact is that I don’t like her. I never have. It’s not just that she reminds me too much of those early days, though she does, but when I see that big raw red face of hers and those flat eyes and silly smile I feel something quite unlike me, I feel afraid.

Well, I shall have who I want to my party. I won’t have Hansine but I’ll insist on Harry and, of course, his wife. I can’t avoid that. If Marie doesn’t like it—Swanny will, she loves Harry—she’s welcome to give up the idea of a party altogether. Isn’t it ridiculous celebrating the fact that my husband and I, who haven’t even liked each other for forty-nine years, have been together for fifty?

September 15th, 1954

I never complained to anyone about Rasmus while he was alive. I didn’t need to, I had my diary to complain to. Not even to Harry, though I could have told him and it would have gone no further.

When you keep a diary as a regular thing over many years it’s not just a record of your life and your thoughts, it becomes a person. Your diary is the one person you can say everything to, you need keep nothing back, you can put down the whole contents of your mind, however bad. Or what the world calls bad. There’s no living human being I could do that to, not even Harry. No, when I come to think of it there are a thousand things I’ve felt but never dared to say to Harry. On the other hand, I’ve put everything down in this diary but one thing.

While I never complained about Rasmus that didn’t stop people telling me how I’d miss him when he was gone. Perhaps they could see I never cared much for him. Even Marie, who ought to know better, was always saying in those last months when he was so ill, that I’d feel his loss more than I could calculate. Well, he’s gone and I don’t. I don’t miss him. I’m free at last and I like it.

When Harry’s wife died, it must be three years ago, he seemed to miss her bitterly. I remembered what he said about not really wanting to marry her and sometimes I wanted to remind him of those words, but I never did. Saying a thing like that can make a person hate you, one or two words are enough, they last for ever. She died and he mourned and I was jealous. I wrote of it at the time but I won’t look back in the diaries, I never do that. I no longer remember what I wrote but I remember the jealousy for a dead woman.

Which one of my children shall I live with? Swanny, of course. There was never any real doubt and they all know it. We were just playing games when we talked about it after the funeral. I shall be a little further away from Harry, that’s all, but that’s of no consequence since he got a car of his own.

November 23rd, 1954

Everyone dies, one after another. Hansine now. Joan Sellway née Cropper sent me a very vulgar card with a black border round it. I shan’t go to the funeral. There have been too many funerals in my life. Besides, the day they are going to have it Harry and I have tickets for a matinée. I am re-reading
Hard Times
, I think for the fifth time.

April 3rd, 1957

I’ve only had two proposals of marriage in my life and they came sixty years apart. The first one I said yes to, more fool me, and the second one was today.

I didn’t expect it. After all, I’m nearly seventy-seven and he must be seventy-five, I’m not absolutely sure but something like that. He’d asked me to have lunch with him and he drove me down to London, to a very nice French place in Charlotte Street. We’ve always enjoyed sharing meals, we both like the same food and a lot of it.

We were having our coffee and a brandy each. Harry’s taken to smoking cigars and I like to see a man with a cigar, though not smoking them myself the way so many Danish women do. He lit his cigar and he said without anything to lead up to it and not a bit nervous, ‘Asta, will you marry me?’

I didn’t know what to say, which is unusual with me. I didn’t blush either. Perhaps you get too old to be able to blush. I think I went pale instead, I know I shivered.

He said, ‘I love you and I know you love me.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, that goes without saying.’

‘Nothing goes without saying, Asta.’ He said it very gently and sweetly.

‘I love you then,’ I said.

And there was a long silence in which we looked at each other and looked away and looked at each other again. In that time I was thinking furiously, I was thinking like I’ve never thought before. Or so I suppose. In a long life like mine you forget what you’ve felt in the past and what you’ve thought before, there’s no use pretending. But I thought how I’d longed for him when we were young and how handsome he was and longing for me, and now I’m a dried-up old woman, really dried up, though no one ever writes things like that down. Except me. I write them. I don’t think I could do those things in bed with a man now, it wouldn’t be possible physically. I am dried and closed like a husk. And my naked body looks as if it needs ironing, nothing else will get the creases out. I’d be ashamed to let a man see me and touch me now.

No doubt, he didn’t mean a marriage with that in it. What’s the point then? That was the only thing in marriage I wanted and never had. The rest is the part I don’t like, the familiarity, the getting to know someone’s worst side, the increasing contempt. That would never happen with us, I could hear him saying if I told him. So I didn’t. I just said no.

‘No, Harry, I won’t marry you,’ I said.

‘Funny, I was afraid you wouldn’t. I almost knew you wouldn’t.’

‘I would have once,’ I said, ‘when we couldn’t.’

‘I wonder what good it’s done us,’ he said, ‘being so good and moral. Sticking with the people we were married to, I mean. Honourable behaviour, they’d have called it when we were young.’

‘You couldn’t have left Mrs Duke,’ I said. It’s funny but I couldn’t remember her name. I’d always just called her Mrs Duke. ‘I always knew that. And I wouldn’t have left my husband. I’m too stubborn, I suppose. You make a bargain and you stick with it but it’s all bosh really, isn’t it?’

He said he didn’t know. He didn’t know the answers, only that it was too late, it would have been too late even if he’d met me when I lived in Lavender Grove and he was single with a job in Islington. ‘But we’ll never leave each other, will we? We’ll be friends till one of us dies?’

I nodded. For a moment I couldn’t speak, so I just kept nodding my head, on and on, like a toy or a doll. He took my hand and kissed it, the way he does sometimes.

June 16th, 1963

I have bought two dozen cards to send out for the chocolate party we shall have for my eighty-third birthday next month. Swanny and Marie will be there, of course, and I shall ask Ann, though no one knows where young people get to these days. Does anyone know where she actually lives? Not with her mother, I’m sure.

Knud and Maureen will have to be invited but I doubt if they’ll come all this way. Knud is supposed to have something wrong with his prostate gland, whatever it is men have. I’m not asking John and his wife, I hardly know them, I don’t suppose I’ve seen John since Rasmus’s funeral. Mrs Evans, of course, and Mrs Cline and Margaret Hammond who’s married now but whose surname I can’t remember. I don’t think women keep up these long-term quarrels like men do. If Mr Housman hadn’t died I’m sure Rasmus would have gone on hating him till
he
died but the flu carried him off by a piece of luck for everyone, to be frank, so that Mrs Housman that I always liked could be free to marry Mr Hammond. I can’t help feeling I’ve written all this before. You do get to repeat yourself at my age. I must remember to ask Swanny for Margaret’s married name and where she lives.

Someone I’d really like to invite is that Mrs Jørgensen I had such an interesting talk with at Swanny’s luncheon party. But I’m told she’s gone back to Denmark. I wonder if she’ll keep her promise and send me a copy of the book she’s writing when it comes out, the one with the chapter in it about the
Georg Stage?

Harry hasn’t gone anywhere, I’m glad to say. A chocolate party would be no celebration without him there. I’d better ask his eldest girl as well and she can drive him. He’s been nervous about driving since he started getting those tremors in his hands.

I’ve left writing about this to the end. In fact, I nearly didn’t write about it at all. Swanny showed me an anonymous letter she had had. Poor thing, she was in an awful state, hardly able to speak, shaking all over, I can’t imagine why. It was just as I was getting ready to go out and buy the cards and I was thinking about that and the people I’d invite and I wasn’t really paying attention. But when she waved the wretched thing at me and I could see she was working herself up, I took it from her, tore it up and burnt it. The best thing to do. I went out immediately afterwards, to be on my own really. Shock doesn’t affect you straightaway, it takes a few minutes. I was shaking a bit as I walked down Willow Road and then I said to myself, who cares? Who cares now?

October 5th, 1964

Ann didn’t phone but came to us this afternoon to tell us Marie had died. We expected it, we were waiting for it, but the shock is still there.

It is a terrible thing to lose one’s children, perhaps the worst thing in the world. But long ago I decided it was for the best not to show my feelings, to keep calm, to carry on. Soldier on, as Torben says. Grief is best kept in the heart—or written down. Nowadays I pretend I have no feelings left and I find people believe it, I think they like to believe it, it removes their responsibility for me. I pretend that my heart has been made hard by the many blows it has taken over all these years.

This diary sometimes looks like a chronicle of death, as one after another die, but I didn’t expect to lose my youngest, only fifty-three and still young to me.

April 21st, 1966

The papers are full of a murder trial, a man called Ian Brady and a woman called Myra Hindley charged with killing children up in Lancashire. It’s fascinating but horrible. From her photographs the woman looks much older than she is, only twenty-something, and the man looks just a thug. To me she looks just like a German, I’m sure she must have German ancestry.

Not many people have known a murderer. It would be strange to find out afterwards that a person you knew had murdered someone. This case has made me remember that business in Navarino Road when we first came to London. My memory is falling to bits because I can’t remember the name of the house or the name of the people, only that I saw the woman once and wished her house was mine.

June 4th, 1966

I hate this forgetfulness. Whole decades of my life have slipped away from me and only a dim impression of a whole ten years remains, like a picture painted on glass that’s nearly faded away. I remember my childhood and going up to the cottage in Strandvej for the summer, that holiday on Bornholm when I was seven, my mother always ill in bed and having to creep about so as not to disturb her. Tante Frederikke used to make me walk with a book on my head for my posture and give me buttermilk soup, which I hated so much and had to sit at the table until I’d finished it. I can remember whole days from that time in the greatest detail. It is the middle years which are gone.