shy—the writer of fiction and non-fiction.
My mother couldn’t understand the kind of fear Swanny had. She could only be indignant, sense that some outrage was being perpetrated, be aware of a great injustice looming. She wanted to set things right by having it out with her mother now, before another night had passed.
Swanny said, ‘I’ll ask her. You’ve shown me I have to ask her.’ She sighed. Her face had taken on that haunted look we were often to see now. ‘I don’t like to make a thing of my age, I’m not old yet, fifty-eight’s not old, but I’m too old to have this happen to me. You hear of teenagers finding out they were adopted. Not people of fifty-eight, for God’s sake. It’s not just horrible, it’s grotesque.’ Although her tone didn’t change, nor her expression, incredulous and attempting a faint ironical amusement, her words made her at last pathetic. ‘I can’t have been adopted, can I, Marie? Can I, Ann? It has to be that the letter-writer’s lying. Oh, if only I hadn’t opened it!’
You would have expected my mother and me to have discussed all this after she had gone but we didn’t. My mother said only that the letter writer probably thought it was true—why did we assume it was a woman?—but that the story probably derived from an invention of Asta’s. You could imagine Asta romancing on about foundlings, several of her stories were about that very subject, and some listeners actually took them seriously. She said it lightly enough, trivializing the whole thing, to make further serious conversation about it impossible. The subject was changed. The fiancé, he who was to be the last of them, the final lover that she was going to marry ‘one day’ to make it all respectable perhaps, he arrived and shortly afterwards I left. Not another word was said about Swanny and quite a long time went by before I heard the outcome.
If this had been one of Asta’s stories it would have involved a tremendous scene with a climax, an opening of the heart and ultimately some sort of confession. But it wasn’t, it was life itself, which she so loved to embroider. Swanny told my mother that after another two days’ delay she came out with it and asked Asta. When it came to it she was actually trembling, she felt sick. The night before, repeatedly telling herself this would be the last night before she knew, she had hardly slept.
Then, in the morning, she nearly fell into further procrastination. Wasn’t anything better than to know? But could she bear to go on not knowing? She and her mother were alone in the house. The ‘daily’ woman didn’t come every day. Swanny pursued her usual tasks, those aspects of housework she enjoyed, polishing certain pieces of furniture, tidying up to improve the look of one of the large reception rooms, taking a delivery of flowers and putting them into her Chinese vases. It was high summer but not at all warm. The grass was bright green and the trees in rich full leaf and the garden full of flowers, but the sky was leaden grey and it was cool.
Asta was still upstairs in her room on the third floor. She often didn’t appear till coffee time but always by then, invariably to come out with some remark about the impossibility of a Dane’s existing without coffee. Fantasies flowed through Swanny’s mind, one after another. Asta had gone away and married Uncle Harry. Asta had died up there. Asta was lying there dead. She thought, not that she would grieve or miss her, but that then she would never know the truth of it.
As the time approached eleven she grew even more sick with tension. It was all stupid, she knew that. Here she was, a woman in late middle age, going out of her mind with anxiety because a week before a poison-pen letter had told her she wasn’t her parents’ child. The letter itself she had read and re-read, had quite got over comparing it to a bag of vomit or a dead rat, had become entirely familiar with it, had long known the words by
My mother couldn’t understand the kind of fear Swanny had. She could only be indignant, sense that some outrage was being perpetrated, be aware of a great injustice looming. She wanted to set things right by having it out with her mother now, before another night had passed.
Swanny said, ‘I’ll ask her. You’ve shown me I have to ask her.’ She sighed. Her face had taken on that haunted look we were often to see now. ‘I don’t like to make a thing of my age, I’m not old yet, fifty-eight’s not old, but I’m too old to have this happen to me. You hear of teenagers finding out they were adopted. Not people of fifty-eight, for God’s sake. It’s not just horrible, it’s grotesque.’ Although her tone didn’t change, nor her expression, incredulous and attempting a faint ironical amusement, her words made her at last pathetic. ‘I can’t have been adopted, can I, Marie? Can I, Ann? It has to be that the letter-writer’s lying. Oh, if only I hadn’t opened it!’
You would have expected my mother and me to have discussed all this after she had gone but we didn’t. My mother said only that the letter writer probably thought it was true—why did we assume it was a woman?—but that the story probably derived from an invention of Asta’s. You could imagine Asta romancing on about foundlings, several of her stories were about that very subject, and some listeners actually took them seriously. She said it lightly enough, trivializing the whole thing, to make further serious conversation about it impossible. The subject was changed. The fiancé, he who was to be the last of them, the final lover that she was going to marry ‘one day’ to make it all respectable perhaps, he arrived and shortly afterwards I left. Not another word was said about Swanny and quite a long time went by before I heard the outcome.
If this had been one of Asta’s stories it would have involved a tremendous scene with a climax, an opening of the heart and ultimately some sort of confession. But it wasn’t, it was life itself, which she so loved to embroider. Swanny told my mother that after another two days’ delay she came out with it and asked Asta. When it came to it she was actually trembling, she felt sick. The night before, repeatedly telling herself this would be the last night before she knew, she had hardly slept.
Then, in the morning, she nearly fell into further procrastination. Wasn’t anything better than to know? But could she bear to go on not knowing? She and her mother were alone in the house. The ‘daily’ woman didn’t come every day. Swanny pursued her usual tasks, those aspects of housework she enjoyed, polishing certain pieces of furniture, tidying up to improve the look of one of the large reception rooms, taking a delivery of flowers and putting them into her Chinese vases. It was high summer but not at all warm. The grass was bright green and the trees in rich full leaf and the garden full of flowers, but the sky was leaden grey and it was cool.
Asta was still upstairs in her room on the third floor. She often didn’t appear till coffee time but always by then, invariably to come out with some remark about the impossibility of a Dane’s existing without coffee. Fantasies flowed through Swanny’s mind, one after another. Asta had gone away and married Uncle Harry. Asta had died up there. Asta was lying there dead. She thought, not that she would grieve or miss her, but that then she would never know the truth of it.
As the time approached eleven she grew even more sick with tension. It was all stupid, she knew that. Here she was, a woman in late middle age, going out of her mind with anxiety because a week before a poison-pen letter had told her she wasn’t her parents’ child. The letter itself she had read and re-read, had quite got over comparing it to a bag of vomit or a dead rat, had become entirely familiar with it, had long known the words by
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