Asta's Book (5 page)

The answering machine was on but still I went up. By the time I had closed the rear of the doll’s house, switched off the light and locked the door behind me, the ringing had stopped, I could hear my own voice saying I wasn’t available and then a woman’s unfamiliar voice.

She had wasted no time, whoever she was, the features editor of a magazine I had only vaguely heard of. She was interested in the future of the diaries now Swanny Kjær was dead. Having heard that there were not only diaries yet untranslated but that extracts from the early diaries had been suppressed, she wanted to know if I as their new possessor would be publishing them. However, she would call me back next day.

I switched off the machine and the phone rang immediately. It was Mrs Elkins. She had been at the funeral but we had scarcely exchanged a word. Would I want her to continue cleaning the house in Willow Road? I said, yes, please, and resisted uttering a panicky cry: Don’t leave me! The nurses, presumably, would know their services were no longer required and some time or other a huge bill would arrive. Thinking of them brought back in a too-vivid picture Swanny’s deathbed and I wondered how long it would take to erase that from my memory, the sight of her rearing up in bed and crying, ‘Nobody, nobody …’

I banished it, temporarily, by concentrating on my plans for her memorial stone. I sat down and drew a gravestone, though I can’t draw, and wrote on it a line from Eliot: ‘There is no end, but addition’, her dates, 1905–1988, and her name as Swanny Kjær. Her name in full no one ever used except occasionally Torben. I was grown up before I knew what it was.

Another ringing from the phone interrupted me. For a moment I couldn’t place the plummy voice and the name Gordon meant nothing. But when he said we’d talked a couple of hours before I knew it was the young man with the rich full blush and the black overcoat. As soon as I heard his name I remembered his sister’s: Gail. They were Gordon and Gail.

‘My second cousin,’ I said.

He wouldn’t have that. He spoke gravely, as if it was of serious importance. ‘No, no, your first cousin once removed. You see, my father was your first cousin.’

‘Right. And your child, when you have one, will be my first cousin
twice
removed.’

‘Oh, I shan’t have any children. I’m gay.’

For one who blushed so easily, he said it with a calm unembarrassed casualness, as if he had been saying he was cold or English or a cricketer. Good. If this was the new way, I was glad.

‘What can I do for you, Gordon?’

‘I’m a genealogist. That is, I’m an amateur genealogist. By profession I’m a banker. And, just for the record, it’s pronounced gee-nee-a-logist, not gee-nee-o-logist. I always tell people because otherwise they get it wrong. I do family trees for people. I charge a thousand pounds a time.’

I said faintly that I didn’t want a family tree.

‘No, no, I don’t suppose you do. I’m doing one for me. My father’s side, the male line. I thought you might give me some help. I wouldn’t take up much of your time, I promise you. I shall be going to Denmark for my summer holiday to trace our forebears there but I shall need a little information—‘he hesitated’—from someone on the spot. And I thought perhaps you’d let me have a look at the diaries.’

‘Three volumes are published. They’re published up to 1934.’

‘I meant the originals. I believe in going back to sources.’

‘They’re in Danish.’

‘I’ve a Danish dictionary. Perhaps sometime I could come and just take a look?’

‘Yes, well, sometime,’ I said.

To avoid more inquiries, instead of switching the machine on to the answer mode I unplugged the phone and the extension. The quite irrational idea came into my head that this was just the night for someone to break into the house in Willow Road and steal the diaries. I had scarcely given them a thought while Swanny was alive. If anyone had wanted to steal them they might easily have done so, she and the night nurse were alone in that big house and couldn’t have stopped them. Now she was dead they were becoming a worry to me. They seemed both enormously valuable and enormously vulnerable. I began to wish I had stayed in Willow Road to keep an eye on things. I wondered if I should sleep.

Then, made uncharacteristically nervous, I became convinced I had left the light on in the room on the mezzanine floor. I had left the light on and not locked the door after me. I went down and found, of course, that the door was locked. I had to open it to check that the light was off. Padanaram, the doll’s house, sat there, looking handsome, owning the room, testifying to long-gone skills and old-fashioned arrogance.

Someday, I would have to find someone to give it to. As I walked back up the stairs I wondered if the little girl who was Ken’s great-granddaughter and Gordon’s niece would like to have it.

The journalist called back next day. I told her no extracts from the diaries had been suppressed. I had no plans for their future and suggested she give me a call next year. With that she had to be content, though I don’t suppose she was.

By lunchtime there had been two more calls, one from a magazine specializing in domestic interiors, who wanted to do a feature on the house in Willow Road, and another from the editor of a Sunday supplement suggesting I might be interviewed for their series on people with famous grandparents. They easily found my phone number. The nature of my work requires that I advertise my services in
The Author.

I said no to both and departed for the newspaper library, to continue with my research of Kensington in 1890 for a client who wrote a series of historical detective stories. Of course I left the machine on. I have to. I need the business—or do I? I asked myself that, coming back on the bus. Did I need it any more, now I had Swanny’s house and Swanny’s money?

However, for that day at any rate, such reflections came too late. The
Hampstead and Highgate Express
had left a message and so had Cary Oliver.

‘It’s Cary, Cary Oliver. Don’t hang up on me, don’t switch the thing off. I know I’ve got an awful cheek but please please can we let bygones be bygones? I’ll explain what I want—yes, of course I want something—I’ll phone you. It’s about the diaries, but you’ve guessed that. I’ll get my nerve together and phone you. But in case, in the highly unlikely event of you feeling like phoning me, I’ll give you my number.’

She gave it, she gave it twice, but I didn’t write it down.

3

MY MOTHER GAVE ME
the doll’s house when I was seven. It was a birthday present and yet it was not. The doll’s house had always been there, occupying a spare bedroom in our house almost to the exclusion of everything else. I was accustomed to it, allowed to look at it but not to play with it. That was reserved for my attainment of the age of reason.

I knew I’d get the doll’s house on my birthday and with it unlimited licence to use it as I wished. Still, if it had been the only present from my mother I think I’d have been disappointed. The ice-skates were what I had longed for and exulted in. Hope deferred may make the heart sick at first; later it leads only to boredom. By the time the doll’s house was mine I was fed up with waiting for it.

Pleasure came later. Inquiring about its provenance came much later. Then I knew only that the doll’s house had been made by my grandfather, a man said by those who had known him to have been capable of making or constructing anything. It was a facsimile of his own house, or, rather, the best and biggest of his houses, and the one they lived in longest. Padanaram was its name and this was also what we called the doll’s house. Indeed, we
always
called the doll’s house Padanaram, whereas I suppose the original was sometimes referred to as ‘our house’ or ‘Far’s house’. For a long time I thought it was a Danish name, a name of sentimental association given to the house by my grandparents to remind them of something or somewhere they had loved in the country they had left. It was my Aunt Swanny who set me right when, some five years afterwards, I asked her and my mother what it meant.

‘Why did you think it was Danish?’

‘Well, they were,’ I said. ‘I just guessed it must be. It’s not English, is it?’

Swanny and my mother laughed a lot and began trying to pronounce Padanaram in a Danish way, giving the ‘d’ a ‘th’ sound and placing a sighing stress on the final syllable.

‘What does it mean then?’ I said.

They didn’t know. Why must it mean anything?

‘The house was called that when Far bought it,’ Swanny said ‘The people who sold it to him would have given it that name.’

No curiosity had impelled any of them to try to find out. In a dictionary of place names I was looking through for quite some other purpose I found Padanaram. A village in Scotland. The name comes from Genesis and means ‘the plain of Syria’. Did it arise from a Nonconformist chapel sited there? My job was discovering such things and it gave me pleasure to tell my aunt. Swanny took it unenthusiastically.

‘Those people who had it first must have been Scottish,’ was all she said. She tried to remember their name but couldn’t.

My Padanaram, that had been my mother’s before me, made for my mother, was about the size of a small dining table, and it was on a dining table whose top was a very little larger than its own area that it stood. The original, sited in Highgate, to the east of the Archway Road, I’d often seen, walking past or from the top of a bus, though of course I’d never been inside it. But according to Swanny and my mother, my Padanaram was a faithful reproduction. The outside certainly looked the same, of stucco and brick, with two large gables, many latticed windows, an imposing front door inside a portico with curved roof showing a Dutch influence. Thousands of such houses were built in the nineties in the suburbs of English cities for a prosperous bourgeoisie.

Morfar had papered the walls with wallpaper he had painted to look like the originals. The stairs he’d made from real oak and french-polished them, according to Swanny. She could remember him sitting there, using bits of cotton wool wrapped in lint to dip in the polish and making painstaking figures of eight, on and on for hours, to bring a deep shine to the wood. The carpets on the floors he made from tapestry cut-offs. He had painted in the brickwork on the outside with rose-madder oil paint and Chinese white, and had made the stained glass for interior and exterior windows from pieces of Venetian glass.

‘Mor had a set of twelve hock glasses,’ Swanny said, ‘and one of them got broken. I suppose Hansine broke it.’

‘Hansine was always breaking things and if Mor broke anything she put the blame on her because Far was such a martinet.’

‘I’d ask her, only she’ll say she’s forgotten. You know what she’s like, Marie. Anyway, whoever broke it, it was broken and Mor said the set was spoiled. I wouldn’t have thought it was. When were they ever going to have more than ten people all drinking German wine at once? But she must have thought the set was spoilt or she’d have made more fuss when Far broke three more to make the stained-glass windows for Padanaram.’

‘He broke wine glasses to make stained-glass windows?’ I said.

‘Don’t ask me, I don’t remember,’ my mother said.

‘You weren’t allowed to see, Marie. It was his big secret. He’d do it after you’d been put to bed.’

‘I know. I had to go to bed early for two years.’

‘Well, it took him that time. Mor made the furniture and the curtains and he built the house. First of all he made the drawings. Mor said he drew like Leonardo, which was amazing for her, she never had 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.