Free Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Page A

and me agreeing like a good little lamb. Well, dreams don’t have much relation to reality, I must say.
    Coal fires have started. I expect the smoke from so many of them makes the fog worse but I like the red coals and the bright flames in my grate in the drawing room at night. It’s not really cold, not the way it was in Stockholm. I wonder what Mrs Gibbons would say if I told her how the wolves used to come down from the hills there when the snow was deep. They were starving and howling for food and one night they ate my washing off the clothesline. I suppose she wouldn’t believe me or else she’d ask if the polar bears came too.
    November 2nd, 1905
    I am writing this upstairs in the boys’ room with the door locked. It’s bitterly cold and I’ve got mittens on and my feet in a footwarmer Tante Frederikke made for me about a hundred years ago. I could ask Hansine to light a fire in the grate but she would only start on how there’s a wonderful fire already in the drawing room and it’s as warm as toast downstairs etcetera.
    The secrecy will have to start now, I suppose. Well, I know. It amuses me when I think about it, how elaborately I will have to keep my best and favourite activity a dark secret the way other women hide a clandestine love affair. I only have love affairs with a notebook! But I want him to know about it as little as some other woman would want her husband to know about the men she spent her time with. They are her passion, this is mine. We can’t all be the same, can we?
    Swanny is lying in my lap, wrapped up in shawls, but although I feel cold my body is warm to the touch and that’s what keeps her warm. She’s fast asleep, clean and sweet and full of good milk. Her hair is the same gold as my wedding ring. People say a baby’s cheek is like a rose leaf but that’s not what they really think, that’s what they get out of books. A baby’s cheek is like a plum, firm as fruit, soft and hard at the same time, as smooth and as cool.
    Last evening I was sitting in the drawing room, not writing in my diary but mending Knud’s sailor suit. His trouser pockets were full of the cigarette cards they are both mad about collecting. ‘Look at this, Knud,’ I said, ‘suppose they’d gone into the tub when Mrs Clegg comes round on Monday to do our washing.’ He wouldn’t answer me, he wouldn’t even look round. He says he won’t answer unless I call him Ken. If you don’t answer me you’ll get a smack you won’t forget, I said, so we are at loggerheads, Knud not speaking to me unless I call him Ken and I adamantly refusing to do any such thing.
    What he needs is a father’s discipline. I was just thinking this—not to mention how Rasmus would give them an inexhaustible supply of cigarette cards, he smokes so much—when there came a smart double knock at the front door. Hansine went to answer it and I heard her give a great scream. What a charming parlourmaid she makes! Anyway, the drawing-room door flew open and in walked my husband.
    I got up and the sewing fell on the floor. Not a word of warning, not a letter for weeks, and then he just walks in one night.
    ‘Well, here I am,’ he said.
    ‘At last,’ I said.
    ‘You don’t seem very pleased to see me.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You might at least give a fellow a kiss.’
    I put up my face and he kissed me and I kissed him back. What else could I do in the circumstances? He certainly is good-looking. I’d half-forgotten that, I’d forgotten the feeling of a little shiver inside me. It’s not love, it’s more like being hungry and I don’t know what to call it.
    ‘Come and see what I’ve brought,’ he said, and I’m such a fool, I never learn, I really thought for a moment he meant presents for us, toys maybe for Mogens and Knud. And I never get over my longing for a fur coat, though I’m sure I’ll never get one. Just at that moment I honestly thought he might have brought me a fur coat.
    So I went out into the hall