Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell

they love him for his cigarette cards and the motor car, he is all in all to them, and poor Mor is nowhere.
    November 21st, 1905
    Hooray! Prince Charles of Denmark has been elected King of Norway.
    For two days I’ve thought I was in the family way again but it was a false alarm, thank goodness. No man can know what that’s like, the waiting and the hoping and the despair from hour to hour, from minute to minute, and the relief when you’re unwell. It’s only been a bit delayed. I suppose there’s nothing else that can happen to you that’s quite like it. Knowing you’re going to have a baby can be the worst thing in the world for some women and the best thing for others, an enormous joy or the most appalling blow, and there’s no middle way. I’ve never come across a woman who said she was rather pleased to be having a baby or rather sorry. No, it’s bliss or horror but more often horror.
    Rasmus’s birthday tomorrow. I meant to pretend I’d forgotten but now all is well I shall give him his present after all. Fancy giving a husband a present because he hasn’t made you enceinte !

5
    ONE OF MORMOR’S favourite stories was of Swanny’s courtship. She called it a romance and talked about it with great pride, for, though both her daughters had made what she called ‘good marriages’, my father had spoilt my mother’s by dying young.
    In spite of speaking Danish like natives, neither Swanny nor my mother went to Denmark until they were grown up. Swanny, at nineteen, had never got over the death of her favourite brother in the First World War. Mormor sent her to stay with her own cousins, the Holbechs, the son and daughter-in-law of her Aunt Frederikke, in Copenhagen. This was Padanaram time, when they were living in some style, and there was money.
    As in the song, Torben Kjær saw a stranger across a crowded room. He was a young diplomat, home on leave from a posting in South America where he was second secretary. Swanny was a bridesmaid at the wedding of a girl called Dorte and Torben was one of the guests. Apparently, he fell in love with her at first sight. He asked her to marry him two days later and accompany him back to wherever it was, Quito or Asunción.
    Mormor would tell this story to anyone who happened to be there and was willing to listen. She told it in front of Swanny and Torben, by then a distinguished-looking grey-haired attaché at the Danish Embassy. He remained impassive, trained to show nothing much. All those years ago, a blue-eyed blond boy of twenty-two, he had returned alone to Ecuador or wherever it was because Swanny had been too astounded by his proposal to take it seriously and didn’t want to go to South America anyway.
    ‘But he never forgot my daughter Swanhild,’ Mormor would say, ‘and for years he wrote her these wonderful love letters which I know are wonderful, though of course I have never seen them. One doesn’t show such letters to one’s mother. When he came to a post here they were married. Imagine it, ten years had passed, but to him he said it was no more than a day. What a romance!’
    Looking at Torben and Swanny now, one could hardly believe it. They were both so suave, so calm, so well-dressed, so middle-aged. My mother, though only six years younger, was like a child beside dignified Swanny. There was no resemblance between them and none between Swanny and Uncle Ken or Swanny and Mormor. Still, they were a family of disparate appearance, none looked very much like any of the others. My mother was much prettier than her mother, though of the same sort of build. Ken looked a bit like one of the uncles in the old photographs, short and burly but with rather handsome pointed features, and his younger son is like him though much taller. They all had reddish or dark-brown hair and eyes ranging from cat’s green to a bright blue, they all were inclined to freckles and sunburn.
    But Swanny—Swanny was the perfect Danish type. Or the Nordic type, perhaps I should