Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell

She said she could wait no longer, she was in anguish, she was stifling. She has heard all this about the battleship Potemkin but now there is no one in the room but her mother, she can literally see no one else. But what can she hope for? An explanation? A dismissal of what she has read as nonsense, not worth thinking of for another moment? She doesn’t know. She only knows she must get her mother away and ask her.
    Why? Why not wait until the party is over? Mormor thinks that, for she tells her impatiently that whatever it is can wait, she is talking, she is telling Mrs Jørgensen about the shelling of Odessa. And she embarrasses Swanny by saying loudly, ‘My petticoat isn’t showing, is it? Is that what’s the matter?’
    Swanny can’t move her. She goes out to the kitchen, ostensibly to find out if lunch can be served in ten minutes. All is well, there is nothing to do. She does something quite alien to her, something she swears she has never done before, takes a swig of snaps , splashing it into a sherry glass and tossing it down.
    She must, of course, go back into the drawing room. Her mother is no longer there, no longer even in the room. She walks about, looking for her. But there are, after all, only eleven people including herself. Perhaps her mother is out in the hall, looking for her, having relented, but before she can leave the room the waitress has appeared to announce luncheon and she must lead her guests into the dining room. Mormor is already there with Mrs Jørgensen, showing her the Royal Copenhagen china in the limited editions and talking about some woman porcelain collector who married a man called Erik Holst, himself a naval officer and one-time cadet on the doomed training ship Georg Stage.
    If she had been able to get her mother alone in those moments she would have asked her. She would have been able to ask her. As it was, when the party was over, some inhibition crushed her and tied her tongue. That first snaps and the rest she had drunk stunned her, all she wanted was to lie down, sleep, find forgetfulness or hope that she would feel differently when she woke up.
    The evening passed. Torben was spending a rare few hours away from home. Mormor reclined on the sofa reading The Old Curiosity Shop and went up to her bedroom early, saying she had had a tiring day. She needed, no doubt, a couple of hours’ solitude in which to write her diary. Swanny had a racking headache. She hadn’t looked at the letter again. It was in her handbag and her handbag was with her in the drawing room, as it always was wherever she might be, on the floor beside her chair or on a sofa cushion. She said she kept looking at it and thinking of the thing inside it. It was as if a bag of vomit or some dead decaying thing had been thrust into her handbag and sometime or other she was going to have to clean it out.
    Long before Torben got home she took two aspirins and went to bed. Although they shared a room, she and Torben had never shared a bed. She woke up very early in the morning, at five or earlier, and she nearly went up to the next floor to wake her mother, to say to her, read this and tell me if it’s true. Is it true? Tell me it isn’t true. I must know.
    But she didn’t. Not then.

6
    BY CHANCE I HAPPENED to be at home when Swanny came round to tell us about the letter. It was a usual Wednesday afternoon. Swanny had even taken care not to arrange a special time. Although it had been a Friday when the letter came, she still waited until the following Wednesday to tell anyone. She made herself wait. As she said, she didn’t ‘want to make a thing of it’. She hadn’t shown the letter to Torben or said anything to Mormor. Nor had she phoned my mother to warn her she had something she particularly wanted to talk about. Of course the truth was she didn’t want to talk about it, she wanted to forget it, but couldn’t. Who could forget a thing like that?
    Her bright silver hair was always beautifully cut.