Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Read Free Book Online Page A

good word for him. He meant to build the house to scale but in the end he abandoned that idea. It was too difficult and it wasn’t necessary. He used to spend whole days hunting for the things he needed, those tapestries, for instance. He plundered Mor’s things shamefully. I remember a necklace she was very fond of, it was only paste though it looked like diamonds, probably it was very good paste. He took it to bits to make a chandelier. And the thing was, she wasn’t even interested. They had terrible rows over it. Do you remember how they fought, Marie?’
    ‘I hated it,’ my mother said.
    ‘He broke a red hock glass and a green one and he meant to break a yellow one, only Mor got so angry she threw it at him and it broke that way. Mor said it was ridiculous making a doll’s house for a five-year-old to spoil. She called it a “palace for a princess” and she said an old packing case would have done just as well.’
    I was about twelve when this conversation took place and Padanaram, a serious plaything of mine for three or four years, had recently taken on the status of a museum piece or exhibit in my life. For some time I had ceased to move dolls in and out of it, have them encounter each other in the various rooms, get up, go to bed, entertain. The adventures they had there, mostly enacted inside my own mind in a stream of mental activity, had dwindled and lost their enchantment. Now I kept Padanaram exquisitely clean, and, having repaired the depredations of the past careless years, darned the tapestries and titivated the upholstery with dry-cleaning fluid, displayed the doll’s house to visiting friends who, if highly favoured, were led into the room where it still stood and permitted to see the hinged fronts opened, though never to touch.
    It was then, probably in the middle of this phase, at its height, that I asked the question. Asking it, I wondered why I had never thought of it before. How could I have possessed Padanaram so long and yet never asked? I had brought a friend home from school to tea and her wonder at the sight of Padanaram, her almost reverential awe, was particularly gratifying. I saw her off, going down to our front gate with her, and came back into our sitting room where my mother was with Swanny, who regularly came to spend Wednesday afternoons.
    They were speaking in Danish. They always did, to each other, to Mormor and, on the rare occasions when they met, to my Uncle Ken. Yet neither of them had been born in Denmark, as Ken had, but in England, in the house before Padanaram or, in Swanny’s case, in Lavender Grove, Hackney. Still, Danish was their first language, truly learned at their mother’s knee.
    At my entry, again as always, Swanny switched to English in mid-speech, and the soft, monotonous, glottal, elided sentence ended in a graceful falling pentameter.
    ‘Why did Morfar make Padanaram for Mummy and not for you?’ I said.
    As I said it, as I was uttering the very words, I had a momentary feeling of making a mistake, a faux pas. I shouldn’t have asked. The question would cause embarrassment. They would be upset by it. But I was wrong. I knew at once I’d said nothing tactless, hurt no feelings. There was no frisson. No half-glance of warning or concealment passed between them. My mother shrugged and smiled. Swanny looked merely amused. But she was prepared to explain. She always appeared frank and open, as all three women did, expansively ready to speak of anything, to air their emotions and open their hearts. This is the insidious kind of frankness, more deceptive and finally maddening than true transparency, the apparent artlessness that seems impulsive and spontaneous, yet masks an ingrained passion for privacy.
    Swanny spoke plainly, even cheerfully.
    ‘He didn’t like me.’
    Immediate protest from my mother. ‘Now that’s not true, Swan!’
    ‘You mean you don’t like it being true.’
    ‘Of course I don’t like it, but that isn’t the point. When you