Authors: Ruth Rendell
Strangely, the last thing I remember her ever saying to me was quite lucid, a story I had never heard before. Swanny was there and I don’t think Swanny had ever heard it either.
I was making one of my evening visits—rarer since Daniel Blain had come to live with me—and Asta was, as usual, reclining on the sofa, reading. Something she read may have recalled this to her. It’s possible she simply invented it.
She began laughing softly. She lifted her head, took off her glasses and said, ‘We had this maid called Emily. We had Hansine too and we also had this Emily who was English. She was a very stupid girl but she meant well. You remember Bjørn, don’t you,
lille
Swanny?’
Swanny looked amazed. She said, yes, of course she did.
‘When we gave Bjørn his food,’ Asta said, ‘we’d always say,
Spis dit brød.
’
‘ “Eat your food,” ’ Swanny said for my benefit, though my Danish was adequate for that.
‘I came upon this silly girl feeding Bjørn and holding out the dish to him and saying, “Beastly boy, beastly boy.” ’
Asta chortled and Swanny managed a doubtful smile. I suppose
spis dit brød
does sound a bit, a very little bit, like ‘beastly boy’. God knows it might have done if the girl took Morfar for her exemplar. Asta went off into a rambling tale of her childhood and I went home to Daniel. Only Daniel wasn’t there, he was meeting Cary somewhere, and soon after that he had left me and gone to Cary.
I’ve said this isn’t my story. The difficulty with that is that it’s I who tell it and the things that happened to me affect it. Perhaps it’s enough to say that Daniel was the only man I had actually ever lived with, as distinct from spending weekends with or going home with overnight. And that, while Asta before she grew senile had seemed to take this as normal behaviour, Swanny had deeply disapproved. She wanted me to regularize things by marrying Daniel and I wanted that too. But Cary set out to take him away, set out with what seemed a planned campaign, deliberate, relentless, unscrupulous, and when a woman does this and she’s attractive she usually succeeds.
The result was to make me get out altogether. It isn’t true that you can’t run away from things. Putting three thousand miles between you and the lost love and his new love does soften the blow, it does begin the process of driving the pain into the past. An American novelist had asked me to research the town of Cirencester in the nineteenth century. Anticipating an almost inevitable refusal, she wanted me to come over, spend some months with her, talk of my finds and of Victorian Gloucestershire, and help her with the American angle of the historical epic she was writing. She was astonished when I said yes.
Therefore, I was in Massachusetts when Asta died.
I knew, as well as anyone ever can know of a coming death, that she was going to die. I also knew how unhappy Swanny was, how lonely and increasingly despairing of her mother and her mother’s ways. It was all in the many letters Swanny wrote to me. She would have liked me to come home. Perhaps she had no idea how I felt, or even thought that because Daniel and I had never been married, things had not gone deep with me. Some women of her generation did think like this. But I was literally afraid to be in the same country, the same
island
, with Daniel and Cary. It wasn’t that I expected to bump into them but rather that wherever I was in the British Isles there would be a sense of proximity absent on the other side of the Atlantic.
Swanny wrote to me that Asta had been taken into hospital with what the doctor said ‘wasn’t exactly a stroke, more a sort of spasm’. Maybe I should have offered to come home. I told myself cravenly that Asta was only my grandmother, that she was very very old, that she had other grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was Swanny who needed me, of course, not Asta. As it turned out it may have been the best thing in the world for Swanny that I didn’t come.
The saddest letter was the one in which she wrote that she realized now she would never know. The question would never be answered. She had asked it for the last time a few days before Asta had her ‘spasm’, one evening when they were sitting together in the drawing room, the curtains were drawn and a gas fire burned in the neat brass grate. Asta had seemed more lucid, more like her old self, all that day.
She lay on the sofa, which was drawn up in front of the fire, a piece of embroidery on the low table,
Martin Chuzzlewit
open and face downwards on the cushion beside her with her reading glasses resting on it. Her white hair, Swanny wrote, was blonde in the golden lamplight and if you looked at her through half-closed eyes you might have fancied it was a young woman reclining there. And Swanny (who was more fanciful and discursive in her letters than in life) asked me if I’d ever read that Poe story about the short-sighted young man who, too vain to wear glasses, courts and nearly marries the sprightly and bedizened old woman he has mistaken for a girl, but who is really his own great-great-grandmother. Swanny said she had never swallowed that before but she could now.
She said to her mother, on an impulse and as if she had never asked it before, ‘Who am I,
moder
? Where did you get me from?’
Asta looked at her, and Swanny said her expression was the most tender and loving she had ever seen on her face, and the most lacking in understanding. ‘You’re mine,
lille
Swanny, all mine. Do you want me to tell you where mothers get babies from? Don’t you know?’
As if she were very young. As if she were a child the teacher had forgotten to include in the sex-education class. Asta’s eyes closed and she fell asleep, as she always did now in the evenings when she laid her book down and took off her glasses.
Swanny phoned to tell me Asta was dead. I didn’t offer to come home and when she was sure I wasn’t going to offer, she begged me not to come, it wasn’t necessary. Asta had been very old, ninety-three, and her death long expected. It was a shock, of course, but death is always that.
A week later she wrote to me.
Moder
put in her will that she didn’t want a funeral. She’d once or twice told me this but I suppose I never believed her. Anyway, I thought you
had
to have a funeral, but evidently not. You can just tell the undertakers and ask for the person to be cremated, which is what I did with many misgivings but they weren’t all that surprised and didn’t seem to find it strange.
Moder
was an out-and-out atheist. She often told me she stopped believing in God when her little boy Mads died. That was the end of it and she never said a prayer again. I remember her saying loudly at one of our parties that she was a Nietzschean and believed God was dead. I don’t know where she picked that up but she knew a lot, she had educated herself extremely well. Anyway, it was right for her to get her wish about no funeral.
In her will she left me everything she had, which wasn’t a great deal but more than I need. It was specifically left to me, ‘to my daughter, Swanhild Kjær’, and of course no questions were asked, I wasn’t even asked for my birth certificate. If I had been, so what? It gives Mor and Far as my parents and names me as Swanhild. But I felt strange about it, it brought up all those old feelings, and I even wondered if I should have said, no, I can’t take it, I’ve no right to it.
Anyway, I didn’t. The point of making a will, after all, is that you leave your things to the people you want to have them and Mor certainly wanted me to have hers. I feel so lost without her. Did you know I’d never really been without her, I’ve never been away from her before this? Even when I first got married Torben and I only lived round the corner. The longest separation was those few weeks I spent in Denmark in 1924 when I was nineteen and I first met Torben. All the rest of my life I’ve either seen Mor every day or spoken on the phone to her, and mostly it was that I saw her. Since Far died we’d lived in the same house, twenty years in the same house. I can’t really believe she’s gone. She was so much a part of my life, she
was
my life. I hear her footstep on the stairs, I hear her voice calling me
lille
Swanny, I smell the L’Aimant she always wore. The other day I opened a drawer in her dressing-table and a gust of her scent came out, it was full of her, and it was so terrible, it made me weep.
I shouldn’t write to you like this, I know that. I should be more cheerful or more philosophical. Her death has set me free and there are all sorts of things I used to think I wanted to do when I was free that I can do now. But I don’t want to do them, I’m too depressed to do anything. On the brighter side, the doctor has given me some pills and at least I can sleep. I think I shall sell this house eventually so that at least I don’t have to live with the memories all round me. Write me a line to cheer me up, if you can.
With much love, as always,
Tante Swanny
I hadn’t called her Tante for ages, not since I was fifteen and said pertly, the way teenagers do, that I was going to drop the ‘aunt’ and she didn’t mind, did she? I think she’d forgotten, she was so low and in such a bad way, she’d forgotten that for years and years I’d called her Swanny like everyone else.
Not that there were many left among that everyone else. Far away from her, in the United States, I found myself trying to work out just who remained to call her by her Christian name. John and Charles, but she hardly ever saw them. Those friends from Embassy days, if any contact had been kept up and I doubted if it had. Daniel’s father, that my mother had been going to marry, had sometimes visited but she’d seen very little of him since she became a widow.
If I’d gone home then, as I sometimes thought I’d have to, I suppose I’d have moved in and lived with Swanny. After all, part of my dread of being near Daniel and Cary was a reluctance to go back to my flat where he and I had lived together for five years, where every room was imbued with him, would probably smell of him, the soap he always used and his cigarettes, the way Asta’s room smelt of her L’Aimant. I seriously thought of never returning there, of getting someone to clear the flat and an agent to sell it, while I stayed at Willow Road.
I was considering it, knowing how happy it would make Swanny, going so far as to wonder if the house could be divided into two separate dwellings for her and me, when another letter came from her, saying she had decided to move.
I don’t like to ask you, as you very likely have other plans, but it would be wonderful if you could be home for Christmas. Do you remember the lovely Christmases we used to have? Christmas means so much to a Dane, the house always so beautifully decorated, the dinner on the Eve. Even last year when poor Mor hardly knew where she was we kept up the tradition, had the almond hidden in the rice, the fruit soup, the goose and the æ
blekage.
I would try to do something like that if you came, even if it were just the two of us.
My news is that I’ve decided to move. This house suddenly seems enormous. I haven’t yet put it into the hands of an agent but I have been going all over it, clearing things out. It is something to do, something to take my mind off my troubles. I didn’t realize we had so much stuff.
I started at the top, in the attics which are crammed full of old books of Torben’s and the sort of suitcases that are really hanging wardrobes and which no one would dream of carrying today but were all right when porters did all the lifting. Imagine taking one of those on a plane, made of hide and heavy as lead before you even put anything into it!
Poor Mor had so little of her own. Her room will be the easiest to clear when I reach there. I didn’t actually realize how few clothes she had left. She must have taken her old dresses and coats one by one to sell at those antique dress places. I wonder what they thought of her. I wonder if they appreciated how wonderful she was or if they thought in their ignorance that she was just a stupid mad old woman.
You can tell how grim I’m feeling by that last sentence, that I can even suppose for a moment people would feel like that about my darling mother. My darling mother that I loved so dearly. For I did love her, Ann, I loved her much more I believe than most old people love an aged parent. I wanted her to live, I
prayed
for that. How she would have laughed!
Well, it’s no good going on like this. As I’ve said, I’ve worked my way through the attics and am making a start on the bedrooms. You must let me know if there’s anything I’ve got that you would like to have. That sounds as if I thought I was going to die myself but I hope you know what I mean. I shall have to get rid of a great deal if I am going to buy a little house up on Holly Mount, which is what I intend.
How is your work going? Did you go to that Thanksgiving dinner you said you’d been invited to? Let me know if there’s a chance you’ll be home in the next three weeks.
With all my love,
Swanny
I didn’t go home for Christmas. I kept thinking of Cary and her treachery. She was more on my mind than Daniel was. I remembered the way she was always telling me how good-looking Daniel was.
‘He’s so good-looking, Ann!’ as if she was surprised such a man should have fallen to my lot. And later, when she was visiting us and he, perhaps, had left the room for a moment, ‘He’s so good-looking,’ with a sigh, as if his good looks were too much for her, as indeed they proved to be.
But ‘He’s so good-looking!’ as if there was nothing else to him. Perhaps there wasn’t, though during those years when we were together he had seemed sensitive and thoughtful, a good listener, witty sometimes, a man who laughed a lot and made others laugh. But Cary, who was nothing if not honest with me when she had succeeded, even explained her unforgivable theft with the same excuse.
‘He was so good-looking, Ann.’
She used the past tense. I noticed this particularly. It was as if his looks had been used for the purpose of capturing her and now they were gone. He looked the same to me, I saw his familiar face with ineffable pain and intense jealousy, but she never mentioned his good looks again, at least not in my hearing.