Asta's Book (47 page)

Such women figure in mythology because once this was the reality. Children were less precious and less valued than today. The laws governing their lives were more lax. Paul and I accepted Gordon’s explanation, as I’ve said, or I accepted it.

The only flaw in it was that it wasn’t true.

27

I HAD FORGOTTEN
Lisa Waring and I believe Cary had too. If she ever came into Cary’s mind she must have thought Lisa had returned to the United States long ago. A mild uneasiness was all she felt when a parcel came, a padded bag containing all the material she had given Lisa, including the three cassettes, and with the sender’s name and address on the back in the American fashion. The address, however, wasn’t America but Battersea. Lisa Waring had moved but not more than a mile or two.

Television productions are seldom transmitted on the expected dates. There are nearly always delays and postponements.
Roper
was to have gone out in February but was put off till April and finally scheduled for May, just over two years after Cary began her project, exactly two years after I discovered the stubs in Asta’s notebooks where the pages had been torn out.

The press screening in early April was at BAFTA, where Paul and I had been to the private showing. It was over by nine and at half-past Miles Sinclair was on the phone to tell me that Lisa Waring had turned up at it, had walked in at the last moment before the lights dimmed and stood surveying the audience before proceeding slowly—and, he said, menacingly—all the way down the aisle to take the only vacant seat in the front row. Miles has nearly as exaggerated a way of talking as Cary and when he described Lisa’s appearance as being like the wicked witch turning up uninvited to the christening or Ate throwing the golden apple into the midst of the guests, I didn’t take him very seriously.

Afterwards, when they were all in the bar and he was in the middle of an interview with some journalist, Lisa came up to Cary and said to her quite baldly that she could tell the press a few things that would make her production look pretty silly. Cary was astounded because Lisa had been perfectly pleasant on that day we had all met and the covering note that came with the returned papers was friendly, saying mostly that she was still in London because she had found freelance work here. Now Lisa was antagonistic. She resented the portrait of her great-grandfather, felt even more angry now she had seen the production on the big screen.

During the past week she had been searching for George Ironsmith’s origins. He had been born in Whitehaven in 1871, apprenticed to a tradesman in Carlisle at the age of fourteen, emigrated to America in 1897 and married her great-grandmother in the autumn of 1904. The substance of her complaint was that Cary should have called her in as an adviser before she went ahead with more screenings of
Roper
and hadn’t done so.

According to Miles, Cary did have the presence of mind to ask her what on earth any of this had to do with the validity of her production. Ironsmith, Lisa said, shouldn’t have been consigned to an insignificant role, he was the most important figure in the drama. She and Cary should talk about it, she was prepared to do this before she spoke to the press. This last remark was uttered in ringing tones but no one took much notice because all the journalists were concerned with was the fate of Edith Roper.

Children are always of interest, girl children for some reason more so, and missing girl children consumingly so. This may have happened eighty-six years before but the press were still fascinated by Edith’s disappearance, the claimants to her identity and all the possibilities of what might have happened to her. They didn’t much care, Miles said, about who might or might not have killed Lizzie, that was water under the bridge, ancient history. So a wild girl with Chinese eyes dressed all in black, shouting about her great-grandfather’s rights, was only a momentary diversion.

Cary didn’t want to know any more. She would have liked Lisa to fall under a bus in Piccadilly and her production to go out unchallenged. But she had to have a meeting with Ironsmith’s great-granddaughter, there was no escape. And I had to be there. I didn’t ask to speak to Cary myself, knowing of old that as soon as she had a man on the premises she would always get him to make her awkward or difficult phone calls for her. She had even managed to use Daniel in this way.

A few days had gone by since Gordon came to tell us Swanny was Hansine’s child. As soon as he had gone Paul said quite adamantly that he knew this solution was the wrong one. He
felt
it was wrong and he thought feelings, intuition, meant a lot in these matters. Without being able to prove it, he knew Hansine had never had a child before his mother’s birth, he knew his mother wasn’t Swanny Kjær’s half-sister. But he thought he could prove it by recourse to the diaries, by examining the original Danish in Asta’s first notebook.

I said nothing to anyone of Gordon’s revelation. Who was there who would care? Gordon’s own father perhaps, and his uncle Charles. If he wanted to, Gordon could tell them himself. More important were the diaries themselves. As things were, much of the interest in the diaries rested on a huge deception. Swanny, the beloved daughter of a woman whose name was almost a household word, was not that woman’s daughter but the illegitimate child of a servant who figured prominently in the diaries. You will see by this that I had very little faith in Paul’s intuition. I don’t trust it, in men or women, and in this case I thought it was a defence he put up against a curiously painful disclosure.

Sometime, I supposed, I would have to decide, I and Swanny’s editor would have to decide, whether the next set of diaries to be published should carry a note to the effect that Swanny wasn’t Asta’s daughter. It would be awkward. It would deprive the existing diaries, those previously published, of a good deal of verisimilitude and it would look like a calculated deception. While Swanny knew, or almost for certain knew, she wasn’t Asta’s child but could only fantasize about whose she might be, it seemed all right for concealment to go on. Things changed when the truth was established. Could we really go ahead and publish
Peace and War
, 1935–1944, while aware that the woman written about on nearly every page, the woman figuring in Gordon’s genealogical table as the elder daughter of Asta and Rasmus, had an entirely different origin?

Time was left to me before I need take any steps. There were a few weeks to go before it would be too late to insert a page of explanation into each of the twenty thousand copies the diaries’ publishers knew they could sell in hardcover. I had, in fact, much less than that to wait. Paul soon found his proof. It came in the early part of the first notebook. First he asked me to read the passage in the published version:

Hansine takes Mogens to the school which is two streets away in Gayhurst Road. He wants to go alone and soon I’ll let him, but not quite yet. She grumbles under her breath because when her visitor is in the house she gets fearful pains in her stomach. I stay at home with Knud and take him on my lap and tell him a story. It used to be H.C. Andersen for both the boys but when I left Denmark I left Andersen behind too. I suddenly realized how cruel some of his stories were.

‘There’s a bit I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘but there are bits like that all through the diaries.’

‘You mean the “visitor in the house”,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t suppose Gordon understood it either. You’re too young.’

I said I was older than he and he laughed and said maybe it wasn’t a matter of age, more of being interested in euphemism. Because he was, he had noticed that phrase when he first read the diaries and it must have remained in his mind. That was the real source of his intuition.

‘I went back to the Danish. The Danes don’t have anywhere like as many euphemisms as we do but they have some. Asta may have been frank about a lot of things but not about menstruation. That’s the last bastion of prudery; you could say it’s only gone down in the past twenty years. Margrethe Cooper translated what Asta originally wrote as “visitor in the house” because in spite of English having more euphemisms than Danish there was no idiomatic translation for Asta’s
den røde blomst
, which actually means “her red flower”.’

If Asta had written
hun har det maanedlige
(she has her monthly) or even
hun har sit skidt
(she has her dirt) it could have been literally translated and there would have been no difficulty. Even Gordon, presumably no expert in female physiology, would have known what that meant. Margrethe Cooper had had to find a matching English expression and had come up with one used by very old women still alive in the 1970s, ‘she has a visitor in the house’.

‘Swanny must have known,’ I said.

‘She knew from her first reading of the first notebook, so from the start she could dismiss Hansine as a possible mother. Hansine menstruating on July the 5th couldn’t have given birth to a child on July the 28th, or even a month later.

It would have been different, as Cary said later, if this had happened a year before. Then with what delight and excitement she would have welcomed Lisa Waring and her revelations from the past. Lisa would have been taken on as her adviser—that she hadn’t was a principal cause of present and ridiculous resentment—and Cary would have enjoyed the distinction of solving a murder nearly a century after it had been committed.

That resentment had another, and very peculiar, cause. Few of us would relish discovering that even a remote ancestor was a probable murderer. A father cast in such a role would be terrible, a grandfather disquieting and a great-grandfather quite bad enough. But that was Lisa Waring’s contention. George Ironsmith, otherwise undistinguished, was, she insisted, the killer of Lizzie Roper and she wanted his rights, she wanted recognition for him, fame or infamy, celebrity or notoriety, whatever you chose to call it.

I had that sensation of watching psychological disturbance actively at work that you have when someone presents the irrational as rational and the absurd as entirely serious. Lisa’s face was pale and heart-shaped, her nose rather long. Only the hair, black and straight and worn pageboy fashion, and her eyes, nipped at the corner by the epicanthic fold, were oriental. As she talked her eyes grew glazed and fixed themselves on a distant point. She had done her homework on the texts given her by Cary and quoted Mr Justice Edmonson verbatim.

‘ “You have been engaged in one of the most remarkable trials that are to be found in the annals of the Criminal Courts of England for many years.” That’s what the judge said. I’m quoting from the transcript of the trial in the Mockridge account. He goes on, “That the unfortunate woman had been done to death there is no doubt She was murdered in a most remarkable way. There is no doubt that the murder was committed by someone who knew well how to put a person quickly to death.” It sounds like he admired the perpetrator of that murder, doesn’t it? Well, doesn’t it?’

We were in Cary’s flat this time and Miles was with us. He said, ‘OK, so you’re looking for some posthumous glory for your great-grandad. It’s weird but it’s well-known some people want the limelight no matter how it comes.’

‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ she said.

I could see Miles was thinking that, in the light of her recent claims, what others would take for an insult would be flattery to her. He didn’t say it.

‘I was going to say,’ he said, ‘that that’s all very well but have you any evidence that George Ironsmith cut Lizzie Roper’s throat?’

She had. If you could believe her. Watching her strange eyes that were dull yet continually shifting, her otherwise concentrated stillness, I had difficulty in believing anything she said. Evidence should be provable and this was hardly that.

‘There’s a family tradition that he killed someone. He couldn’t go back to Britain for that reason. Everyone in our family knew it. His wife knew it and he told his daughter, who was my grandmother, he told her when she was sixteen. That was just before he died.’

She had made a rough genealogical table, just a direct family line of descendants of George Ironsmith, nothing like the complicated structure of Gordon’s Westerby tree. It was passed round and I spent a minute or two looking at it. Ironsmith had married a woman called Mary Schaffer in 1904 and they had one daughter, also Mary, born that same year. Mary Ironsmith married Clarence Waring in 1922 and the youngest of their four children, Spencer Waring, born in 1933, married Betty Wong Feldman in 1959. These two were Lisa’s parents.

A ‘family tradition’ wasn’t of course proof that Ironsmith had killed anyone. Lisa had been in touch with her father since she first saw Cary’s video and he had sent her a bundle of papers that had come down to him from his own mother. As far as I could see, the only item of any relevance was a postcard Ironsmith had sent to his wife from England in 1905. There was no address on it beyond ‘London’ but it was dated and the date was July 28th. Another interesting thing about this postcard was the picture. Visitors to London mostly send home picture postcards of Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament but this one was of the boating lake in Victoria Park, a sepia photograph of the only scenic part of Hackney.

Ironsmith’s message to his wife was that he would be leaving for home on the following day, that is, Saturday, July 29th. That was all there was on the card apart from ‘Dearest Mary,’ a line about the weather being hotter than at home, ‘my best love, Georgie’, and, at the top, above the address, a curious mark like an asterisk, or a multiplication mark drawn on top of a plus sign. It proved Ironsmith had been in London and probably in Hackney around the time of Lizzie’s death but not that he had killed her.

‘What’s the significance of that mark?’ Cary asked.

‘It’s to tell my great-grandmother he’d killed Lizzie.’

This was so patently ridiculous we had nothing to say to it. Lisa gave us her explanation just the same. Mary Schaffer Ironsmith was jealous of the woman she saw as a rival and could only be satisfied when she knew she was dead and out of the way. Lisa’s father remembered his mother saying what a devoted couple her parents were. Ironsmith ‘adored’ his wife, he would have done anything for her.