Asta's Book (6 page)

‘Why did Morfar make Padanaram for Mummy and not for you?’ I said.

As I said it, as I was uttering the very words, I had a momentary feeling of making a mistake, a
faux pas.
I shouldn’t have asked. The question would cause embarrassment. They would be upset by it. But I was wrong. I knew at once I’d said nothing tactless, hurt no feelings. There was no
frisson.
No half-glance of warning or concealment passed between them. My mother shrugged and smiled. Swanny looked merely amused. But she was prepared to explain. She always appeared frank and open, as all three women did, expansively ready to speak of anything, to air their emotions and open their hearts. This is the insidious kind of frankness, more deceptive and finally maddening than true transparency, the apparent artlessness that seems impulsive and spontaneous, yet masks an ingrained passion for privacy.

Swanny spoke plainly, even cheerfully.

‘He didn’t like me.’

Immediate protest from my mother. ‘Now that’s not true, Swan!’

‘You mean you don’t like it being true.’

‘Of course I don’t like it, but that isn’t the point. When you 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 close at hand. East London was where they had come to in 1905 and, to use a phrase that would have meant nothing to them, ‘upwardly mobile’, they had moved northwards into a bigger and better house. The original Padanaram was the summit of their upward mobility in the area of home-buying. During the depression of the early thirties, when Morfar’s business failed, they were forced to move to a shabby double-fronted villa in a road off Crouch Hill, to be known in the family from its street number, as was the family’s way, always as ‘98’.

It may be only hindsight, but now it seems to me that I always saw them as slightly disreputable. It must be hindsight when I say they were like hippies grown old, since in the fifties no hippie had yet come into being. Unlike my Eastbrook forebears, they weren’t stalwart reliable people, but retained into old age something childlike and capricious. Morfar was a violent old man, without wisdom, constantly looking back to regret lost opportunity and blaming everyone but himself for that loss.

A tall and handsome figure, who always wore a beard (according to his wife, to hide a weak chin), he came regularly to our house on a Sunday afternoon for conversation with my mother’s ‘fiancé’. My mother had a number of these ‘fiancés’, in series of course, none of whom she married nor even perhaps had any intention of marrying. No doubt they were her lovers but if they were, she acted in their company with a quite uncharacteristic discretion and none of them ever stayed overnight. Morfar took a great fancy to one of them, whether the first or the second I don’t remember, and passed a good two hours of a Sunday telling this man the story of his life.

His English never became good. It was fluent, of course, but grammatically appalling, each phrase studded with errors. Nine out of every ten words he mispronounced. He was especially bad with ultimate ‘d’s, ‘w’ sounds and the letter ‘b’, which in his rendering changed to ‘v’. Reading this, I see how merciless it looks, how unsympathetic towards an old man’s ineptitude, yet no one who had known Morfar could have seen him in that light. He was so self-assured, so confident of his general superiority to all, so insensitive, so certain of his linguistic mastery, that he would often boast of being equally proficient in Danish, English and German, to the extent of having to pause and think before he could be sure which language he was speaking.

Seated in our living room, drinking sweet tea, he would inflict on my mother’s fiancé a stream of doleful or indignant reminiscence, sometimes growing heated and thumping a large gnarled fist on our coffee table. Everyone, it seemed, that he had ever been associated with in his business ventures had swindled him, a word frequently on his lips and rendered as ‘shvinded’. ‘It schoothe not have veen,’ was what he said when he meant something shouldn’t have happened, which was almost every transaction of his commercial life.

Casual clothes were unknown to him, even the formal casual clothes of the period, sports jackets and flannel trousers. He always wore a suit, a shirt with a stiff white collar and a dark tie, in winter a grey trilby hat and in summer a straw boater. And he invariably arrived, in one of his ancient cars of course, the Morris 10 or the huge unwieldy Fiat, alone.

He and Mormor seldom went anywhere together. Until I read the diaries I had only a distorted idea of what their married life must have been. They had stayed together, but most people did, however incompatible. Mormor sometimes said, with a harsh laugh, that she had to live in a big house ‘to get away from my husband’. Even to me, he was always referred to as her husband, never ‘Morfar’ or ‘your grandfather’ or ‘Rasmus’. ‘Ninety-eight’ was scarcely big enough to allow of this freedom, though there were four bedrooms. Looking back, it astonishes me that until he died they continued to share a bedroom and a bed.

She went out on her own. When she came to us it was on her own. A small thin woman with elaborately coiffed white hair, she was the last person you would have thought of as a walker. But she walked, she always had, roving apparently purposelessly the streets near her home, stopping to stare at houses, peer over garden fences, sit on seats and mutter to herself, walk again. She dressed until she died at ninety-three in the fashions of the twenties, her prime and when she had been at her richest. Photographs of her in these clothes show a tweed coat by Chantal, a Lelong dress, a rubberized raincoat and flyer’s helmet by Schiaparelli. For a few years, Morfar had made money selling his Cadillacs and was not yet the prey of swindlers.

But mostly I remember her in waistless black or dark-blue ‘frocks’ with embroidered insertions in their V-necks, high-heeled shoes with double instep straps. She went for her long walks in those shoes, grinding the heels down. For going out in the evenings and for funerals she had a black satin coat in a crossover style that fastened with a single jet button, and a pancake-shaped black satin hat. The first time I saw this hat was when she wore it in our house at a family gathering after Morfar was dead.

Never one to beat about the bush, she came straight to the point.

‘Now I must decide which one of you three I am to live with.’

She spoke as if such a decision must lie entirely with her. Had any widowed parent since Lear dared to put it so bluntly? Mormor was a reader but it was Dickens she read, not Shakespeare. She had Lear’s choice of making her home with one of three children, though one of them was male. John, Charles and I sat silent, possibly aware this was a momentous meeting.

Swanny and my mother were no Goneril and Regan. Still, no one spoke. Mormor surveyed her son and her youngest daughter with that mild malice, tempered with amusement, a twitchy smile, that was so characteristic of her. I doubt if she had ever seriously thought of Ken’s large dark mansion flat near Baker Street as a possible home for herself, nor of the stout dull headmaster’s daughter he had married as a possible companion. But she would keep them on the hook for a few minutes longer, savouring Maureen’s efforts and her failure to look warm and sympathetic, before turning away and levelling her gaze on my mother.

‘I shouldn’t take up much room, Marie.’

While almost everyone who knew my mother had anglicized her name into Mari or gallicized it into Maree, Mormor and Swanny continued to pronounce it in the Danish way, roughly as Maria with the ‘r’ coming from the throat. As she spoke, Mormor seemed to swallow her ‘r’ even more than usual.

My mother said, rather feebly, that we really didn’t have any room, and it was true that our house was small. But we had three bedrooms and if some solution could have been found to the problem of where to put Padanaram, the third could have accommodated Mormor. My mother and I lived on the income my father had left her, having inherited from his own grandmother the capital it derived from, plus her widow’s pension and the considerable allowance my Eastbrook grandfather made her, an allowance which continued under his will. We were quite well-off.

Both she and Swanny would have thought it demeaning for a married woman or a widow to work, an almost direct reversal of the attitude prevailing today. I never heard my mother mention the possibility of taking a job. She had no hobbies, no apparent interests beyond reading women’s magazines and light popular fiction. She kept our house clean and cooked very nicely. As far as I know she was serenely happy. She looked it. She was even-tempered, sweet, pretty and kind. I never once saw her in tears. A large part of her time she spent in caring for her clothes and looking after her appearance. Shopping she enjoyed and going to the hairdresser. After I came home from school she would change her clothes, do her hair and make up her face in the heavy elaborate way that was then fashionable, and one of the fiancés would come or else we would go out, usually to the cinema. For years we went to the pictures twice a week.

What did she and the fiancé do? Talk, as far as I know, sometimes put on a record and dance. I never saw a kiss or a touch, apart from the dancing. Two of them had cars and would take us out for drives. I was always included in these trips and on long Saturday or Sunday outings, but once a week, until I was old enough to be left by myself, my mother would go out alone and Swanny would come to be with me. I have since supposed that it was on these occasions that she and the current fiancé went somewhere to make love, but I may be wrong.

Into this pleasant innocent existence my mother had no intention of allowing Mormor to intrude. I remembered how, when I had inquired about the doll’s house, Swanny had said simply that Mormor loved her best. And perhaps we all understood, within moments of her selection beginning, that it was to be Swanny with whom Mormor would choose to live until she died.

But she wasn’t prepared to put the rest of us out of our suspense just yet. When she wanted to use an endearment to her daughters or to me she would prefix our names with the adjective
lille.
In Danish this of course means ‘little’, but it can carry in its sense far more than the English word, a suggestion of ‘dear’, of affection, of tenderness. Swanny received it most often – ‘
lille
Swanny’. Now it was my mother’s turn, a fairly rare instance.

‘I could have your guest room,
lille
Marie. You could put that old doll’s house in your garage.’