Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Page B

only once the story about the big dinner party in Copenhagen in the twenties at which she and Morfar were the one couple who had never been divorced.
    It was at a Willow Road party that I heard her tell the one about her cousin accidentally killing her lover with poisonous fungi and on that same occasion the one about some relative going to an orphanage in Odense to pick out a child for adoption. This story has some relevance to what happened later. I suppose I ought to say now that I never knew how much of these stories was true and how much exaggeration and embroidery. Mormor, as I’ve said, was a true novelist, only her novels were the diaries she wrote over a period of sixty years. I don’t really know it but I’d guess that the truth with its disappointing complexities and its failed dramas, the sort of damp squib properties it often has, dissatisfied her. She made it better. She gave it a beginning, a middle and an end. With her it always had a climax.
    Mormor had no brothers or sisters. This was supposed to have happened to a wealthy cousin, one of the Swedish lot. The woman was happily married but childless and eventually she and her husband decided to adopt, a simple enough business at that time. According to Mormor, you picked the child you wanted and took it home with you.
    Sigrid’s husband took her to an orphanage in Odense on the island of Fyn, native place of Mormor’s mother’s favourite Hans Andersen. (Mormor digressed here to say how she hated Andersen and give a reminder to her audience that he was, nevertheless, ‘the world’s greatest children’s writer’.) The submissive Sigrid was led by a matron to a particular child, a little boy whose beauty and pretty ways immediately won her heart. He was about a year old, according to Mormor.
    ‘My cousin loved him at once,’ she said. ‘She took him home with her and they adopted him and then the husband told her the truth. This was his child by another woman, a girl he had met on business trips to Odense.’ She added, with relish, ‘His mistress.’ It was a word which, to her, carried many undertones of glamour and vice. ‘He had arranged the whole thing. Sigrid forgave him and kept the boy and he must be quite an old man by now.’ Here Mormor fixed a fierce and brilliant blue eye on one of the men in her audience. ‘I wouldn’t have. The very idea! That boy would have gone straight back to where he came from.’
    Of course a discussion ensued on the ethics of all this and people said what they would have done in Sigrid’s position and her husband’s position.
    ‘You might have loved him by then,’ a woman suggested.
    ‘I wouldn’t have,’ Mormor said. ‘Knowing whose he was and how I’d been deceived would have finished that.’ And then, devastatingly, ‘I don’t love people easily.’ Her eyes roved the faces, the distant reaches of the room. ‘Most of this talk of love is bosh!’
    It was one of her favourite words. Sentimentality and tenderness, sensitivity and diffidence, it was all bosh. Drama was what she liked, vitality and power. Many of her stories featured violent death. After the great market crash of 1929 another cousin, the brother of this Sigrid, had shot himself, leaving his widow and four children bereft. A distant relative emigrated to the United States in the 1880s and never knew until he was an old man returned to Denmark that the house he had lived in with his wife and children in Chicago on North Clark Street, was next door to the site of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
    Mormor, by day, wandered Hampstead and the Heath. She walked up and down Heath Street and in and out of the shops, ‘just looking’. She talked to people and what they said to her she put in her diaries, but she made no friends. Hers was the journalist’s way of being in touch with others. She interviewed them. My mother told me she had no women friends, she could never remember her mother having a single close ‘chum’. Morfar had