Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Page A

Strangely, this made it look not as if it were naturally that colour but as if it had been artificially made that way. The effect of dark red lipstick against that lightly tanned skin was arresting. Torben’s rings on her left hand were platinum and diamonds, large bright diamonds, and she wore diamond earrings that Nancy Mitford said somewhere were just the thing for an ageing face. I used to think that I’d like to look like her when I was her age but I’m only ten years off it now and I don’t. Not at all. It would be surprising if I did.
    She took the letter out of her bag with the very tips of her fingers. She made her fingers into tongs, yet it wasn’t a theatrical or affected gesture but a natural expression of disgust. My mother tried to make light of it.
    ‘I’ve never seen one of these before.’
    ‘Don’t mock, Marie, please don’t. I can’t bear it.’
    ‘Swanny,’ said my mother, ‘you don’t mean you believe this rubbish?’
    Swanny’s eyes went rather helplessly from my mother to me. She put her hands down and clasped them together as if without that clutch they might fly apart and spring up again. ‘Why would this person say it if it wasn’t true? Whoever it is, they wouldn’t just make it up.’
    ‘Of course they would. It’s someone who’s envious of you.’
    ‘It’s someone who saw your picture in the Tatler ,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, surely not. How would they know where I lived? How could they know anything about me?’
    ‘Honestly, Swan, you tell me not to mock but actually I could just burst out laughing. No one but you would give it a moment’s credence. I mean, if it was me I’d just have burnt it.’
    Swanny said very quietly, and that was when we knew how seriously she took it, how she must have been thinking about it, ‘It wouldn’t have come to you, would it? You look just like Mor.’
    Then my mother did laugh, if a bit hollowly. ‘The obvious thing is to ask her. If you really take this seriously, ask her.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I can’t think why you haven’t already. If it was me I’d have asked her straight away.’
    ‘Don’t keep saying if it was you, Marie.’
    ‘All right. Sorry. Just ask her. You should have asked her last Friday, but ask her now.’
    Swanny made a movement of her head, a tiny shake. She said, very quietly, ‘I was afraid.’
    ‘Oh, but you must ask her. You must. Is this really worrying you?’
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Of course you must ask her. Now. As soon as you get home. Show her the letter. It’ll turn out that this anonymous beast , this pig, this totally mad person, meant something quite different.’
    Swanny said simply, looking from one to the other of us, ‘Like what?’
    ‘Well, I don’t know. How should I know? But it’s obviously nonsense. You’re Mor’s favourite, you’ve said so yourself, you know you are. She’s always saying it, she doesn’t care whose feelings she hurts. I mean, is it likely she adopted you? Why would she? Look at it like that, why can’t you? She could have kids of her own, she was always having them, even now she often moans about the number of kids she had and blames it on Far.’
    ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ I said.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘D’you want me to ask her?’ my mother said.
    Swanny lifted her shoulders, shook her head.
    ‘I don’t mind asking her. I’ll come back with you and ask her if you like.’
    Of course Swanny wasn’t going to have that. My mother would have done it. If it had been she who got the letter, she would have asked her straight out, on the spot. I loved my mother and remember her with affection, she was a good mother to me and she was unusually unselfish, but it’s no use pretending she was sensitive or had much imagination. Swanny had the sensitivity, the reticence, was the imaginative, diffident one. Curiously, though, all these traits were present in Asta, who was sensitive and insensitive, gentle and hard, tough and vulnerable, aggressive and