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

were little Far and Mor weren’t living in the sort of house you’d copy for a doll’s house. They were living in Stamford Hill. I was born there. No one would make a doll’s house to look like that place in Ravensdale Road.’
    ‘And since when,’ said Swanny, ‘does a doll’s-house-maker have to copy his own house? He can copy someone else’s, can’t he, or make one up out of his own head? If I can admit it, why can’t you? He never liked me, he scarcely took any notice of me. You were the daughter he was waiting for.’ She gave my mother a sidelong look, a charming almost coquettish look. ‘After all, Mor loved me best.’ Nothing was said. ‘Still does. Always will.’ She started laughing.
    ‘Thank goodness,’ my mother said.
    Scandinavians have solved that question of what to call one’s grandparents. Not for them the decision as to which grandmother shall be called Grandma and which Granny, which grandfather Grandpa and which Grandad, nor the awkward habit of speaking of ‘Grandpa Smith’ and ‘Grandpa Jones’. One’s mother’s mother is simply that, Mormor, and one’s mother’s father Morfar. Similarly, the other side would be Farmor and Farfar. I called my mother’s mother Mormor from the start because my Mormor had called her grandmother that and I never questioned it until I went to school and the other children laughed or mocked.
    After that I learned to refer to ‘my grandmother’ and, in relation to Padanaram, ‘my grandfather’. The old names were kept for family use and, in Mormor’s case, direct address. I shall sometimes call them Mormor and Morfar in this narrative but more often refer to them by their Christian names, Asta and Rasmus, for this is only occasionally my story, I am only the watcher and the recorder, the note-taker, the privileged insider. Mormor and Morfar do not figure in it as my grandparents but as themselves, as Asta and Rasmus Westerby, Danish immigrants to an insular and xenophobic country at an inauspicious time, the doll’s house-maker and his wife, the diarist and her husband.
    Still, it’s not their story either, though they play important parts in it. Nor the story of my mother, for whom the doll’s house was made, nor of Jack and Ken, born Mogens and Knud, nor of Hansine Fink’s descendants. It is the story of Swanny herself, my grandparents’ elder daughter, Swanhild Asta Vibeke Kjær, born Westerby.
    Or perhaps born something else.
    My parents had to get married. This was quite a disgraceful procedure in 1940, though the alternative was worse. My mother never made a secret of it but told me the tale with Westerby openness. She was married in August and I was born in December. In the meantime, my father, a fighter pilot eight years her junior, was burned to death in his blazing Spitfire over Kent. It was on one of the last days of the Battle of Britain. Mormor and Swanny also, from time to time, told me the tale of the hasty marriage. Only Morfar had been enraged, disgusted, appalled (his words, apparently), and all for disowning his favourite child. Absurdly, he had threatened to take the doll’s house back. Padanaram, made for her, owned by no one but her, the child’s unique property, the errant woman was to forfeit.
    Socially one of the élite, my father had come down the scale a step or two in marrying Marie Westerby. His own father was a small Somerset squire and his mother an Honourable. But this pale grey pair, thin, gentle and unfailingly courteous, welcomed their son’s widow as if, instead of a waitress in the officers’ mess, she had been the daughter of some neighbouring landowner. Once a year we spent a week with them in their small manor house near Taunton. Away from them, I recalled only their low voices, an almost extravagant gentleness and an absent-mindedness, particularly marked in Grandpa Eastbrook, so apparent as to make me ask my mother if he was talking in his sleep.
    Very different were the grandparents who lived