Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Page A

say. She was taller than any of them, even Morfar, and she was a dazzling blonde. In sunshine she went brown, not freckled. Her eyes were a dark sea-blue. Even in the days I’m talking about, Willow Road in its heyday, Hampstead in the sixties, when she was in her late fifties, she still had that look of a goddess out of Wagner, with hair silver instead of gold and a profile like an empress on an ancient coin.
    She and Torben gave a lot of parties. I didn’t know and still don’t if he was obliged to give them as a diplomat or if they just liked parties. A bit of both, I expect. I used to go to them, or some of them, because I was at college just over the hill, and because there was a man who was one of Torben’s assistants, and was always roped in to help with drinks and conversation, that I was keen on. Later on he became keen on me too but that is another story.
    Mormor loved those parties. My mother, who occasionally came with the current fiancé, used to say to me she expected Swanny and Torben would have preferred Mormor to keep out of it, to stay in her own room or at least leave early, but didn’t know how to tell her without hurting her feelings. For ‘hurting her feelings’ I privately substituted ‘making her furious’, as I never saw Mormor as vulnerable or sensitive. After all, she wasn’t the usual old granny, infirm and bumbling, sitting in the corner and complaining about her ailments to anyone who would listen. I think, if they were wise and they were, they saw her as an attraction, a star turn. Some of those people came to their parties because they knew Swanny’s mother would be there and Swanny’s mother was fun .
    I’ve since thought how they must look back, remembering it was Asta Westerby of Asta they met in the house in Willow Road and who told them those stories, many of which appeared in the diaries. If they had known would they have paid more attention, been more polite, more deferential? Perhaps not. I never saw signs of Mormor being neglected. It was rather the reverse. She was always one of an animated group and it seemed to me she always dominated it.
    Why didn’t she get tired, like old ladies of eighty are supposed to? Why did she never say at nine o’clock that she must be off to bed? She never mentioned tiredness, never seemed to flag. An enormous energy possessed her. She was tiny, her body too small for her rather large head. I suppose her body had shrunk and her head hadn’t. Her face, by then only a little less white than her hair, was copiously powdered but otherwise without make-up. She smelt strongly of Coty’s L’Aimant as if her clothes were steeped in it. She often wore one of those brooches that must make conservationists wince, a piece of blue butterfly’s wing mounted in mica and gold. It brought out the colour of her eyes, which were the same sort of blue, but in fact it needed no bringing out, being sharp and brilliant enough, and the combination of eyes and brooch, instead of flattering, was somehow embarrassing.
    A curious thing about her was that she never sat down. Of course she must have sat down and if I think specifically about occasions when we were together I can place her in a certain chair at a certain time, but still my overall memory of her is that she was always on her feet or else reclining as in the picture of Mme Recamier. Certainly, at those parties she stood the whole time. People knew better than to offer her a chair.
    ‘Why? Are you tired of standing up talking to me?’ she said sharply to some hapless young man who was new there.
    To the Danes among the company she spoke Danish. It was by then as heavily accented as her English was, one of these people told me. Her accent gave a curious piquancy to the stories she told, at least to my ears. Although I’ve read most of them in the diaries since then, she seldom repeated herself in reality. Before I read it I only once heard the story about Karoline, the girl who peed in the street, and