Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online

house’ or ‘Far’s house’. For a long time I thought it was a Danish name, a name of sentimental association given to the house by my grandparents to remind them of something or somewhere they had loved in the country they had left. It was my Aunt Swanny who set me right when, some five years afterwards, I asked her and my mother what it meant.
    ‘Why did you think it was Danish?’
    ‘Well, they were,’ I said. ‘I just guessed it must be. It’s not English, is it?’
    Swanny and my mother laughed a lot and began trying to pronounce Padanaram in a Danish way, giving the ‘d’ a ‘th’ sound and placing a sighing stress on the final syllable.
    ‘What does it mean then?’ I said.
    They didn’t know. Why must it mean anything?
    ‘The house was called that when Far bought it,’ Swanny said ‘The people who sold it to him would have given it that name.’
    No curiosity had impelled any of them to try to find out. In a dictionary of place names I was looking through for quite some other purpose I found Padanaram. A village in Scotland. The name comes from Genesis and means ‘the plain of Syria’. Did it arise from a Nonconformist chapel sited there? My job was discovering such things and it gave me pleasure to tell my aunt. Swanny took it unenthusiastically.
    ‘Those people who had it first must have been Scottish,’ was all she said. She tried to remember their name but couldn’t.
    My Padanaram, that had been my mother’s before me, made for my mother, was about the size of a small dining table, and it was on a dining table whose top was a very little larger than its own area that it stood. The original, sited in Highgate, to the east of the Archway Road, I’d often seen, walking past or from the top of a bus, though of course I’d never been inside it. But according to Swanny and my mother, my Padanaram was a faithful reproduction. The outside certainly looked the same, of stucco and brick, with two large gables, many latticed windows, an imposing front door inside a portico with curved roof showing a Dutch influence. Thousands of such houses were built in the nineties in the suburbs of English cities for a prosperous bourgeoisie.
    Morfar had papered the walls with wallpaper he had painted to look like the originals. The stairs he’d made from real oak and french-polished them, according to Swanny. She could remember him sitting there, using bits of cotton wool wrapped in lint to dip in the polish and making painstaking figures of eight, on and on for hours, to bring a deep shine to the wood. The carpets on the floors he made from tapestry cut-offs. He had painted in the brickwork on the outside with rose-madder oil paint and Chinese white, and had made the stained glass for interior and exterior windows from pieces of Venetian glass.
    ‘Mor had a set of twelve hock glasses,’ Swanny said, ‘and one of them got broken. I suppose Hansine broke it.’
    ‘Hansine was always breaking things and if Mor broke anything she put the blame on her because Far was such a martinet.’
    ‘I’d ask her, only she’ll say she’s forgotten. You know what she’s like, Marie. Anyway, whoever broke it, it was broken and Mor said the set was spoiled. I wouldn’t have thought it was. When were they ever going to have more than ten people all drinking German wine at once? But she must have thought the set was spoilt or she’d have made more fuss when Far broke three more to make the stained-glass windows for Padanaram.’
    ‘He broke wine glasses to make stained-glass windows?’ I said.
    ‘Don’t ask me, I don’t remember,’ my mother said.
    ‘You weren’t allowed to see, Marie. It was his big secret. He’d do it after you’d been put to bed.’
    ‘I know. I had to go to bed early for two years.’
    ‘Well, it took him that time. Mor made the furniture and the curtains and he built the house. First of all he made the drawings. Mor said he drew like Leonardo, which was amazing for her, she never had a