Free Asta's Book by Ruth Rendell Page B

with him but there was nothing there. He threw open the front door and pointed out into the street. There’s a lamp right outside our house, so I could make it out all right. Besides, he’d already stuck an oil lamp on the road next to it so that it wouldn’t get bumped into by a cart.
    A motor car. A big one with spokes on its wheels like a bicycle, only four of them. ‘She’s a Hammel,’ he said, ‘made in Denmark. Isn’t she beautiful?’
    It was freezing out there, so we went back indoors and he was talking motors before he’d even got his coat off. What he really wants is to get hold of the kind called an Oldsmobile, an American machine. He said they made 5,000 of them last year, which made me laugh because it’s so absurd. He always exaggerates everything. Five thousand, I said, you wouldn’t be able to move along the roads. Automobiles, he said, that’s what they call them over there, and he gave them a lot of other names, oleo locomotive and motorig and diamote among others, with a look of adoration on his face that he’s never had for me.
    I thought he’d soon be back with that old idea that we all decamp and set off for America, land of the three-horsepower curved-dash automobile, so when I’d listened to a whole lot more of this stuff and rubbish about the Duryea Brothers and someone called James Ward Packard, I asked him if he’d like to see his daughter.
    ‘I daresay I’d better,’ was what he said. Charming!
    She was asleep. But she woke up when we came in and he saw her open her beautiful dark-blue eyes.
    ‘Very nice,’ he said, and, ‘Where does she get that colour hair from?’
    ‘All Danes are fair,’ I said.
    ‘Except you and me,’ he said with a funny sort of laugh.
    I can always tell when he really means something or when he’s just what he calls ‘joking’. He was joking then, he didn’t seriously mean to imply anything.
    ‘Her name is Swanhild,’ I said, pronouncing it the English way, knowing how he likes anything English.
    ‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘for making up your mind without consulting me.’
    I said he hadn’t been here to be consulted and we quarrelled a bit the way we invariably do. But he didn’t say any more about her not looking like us. If I know him he knows me and he knows I’d never be unfaithful to him, he knows I’d see that as just about the worst thing a woman can do. We women don’t have to be brave and strong or good at earning money like men and if we are it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count. We have to be chaste. That’s the only word I can think of that expresses what I mean. That’s where our honour is, in being chaste, pure in our behaviour and faithful to our husbands. I must say it would be easier if one had a nice loving husband but that’s life!
    November 6th, 1905
    When I first started writing this diary I told myself I’d write down only the absolute truth. Now I understand that’s not possible. It wouldn’t be possible for anyone, not just me. All I can do is be honest about what I feel, I can do that, what I feel and what I believe in. Total openness about facts I can’t manage and I’ve given up arguing with myself about it. I needn’t tell lies but I can’t tell the whole truth.
    Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day. They just as often call it Bonfire Day and when I heard that I thought it must be the way they celebrate St Nicholas, though that’s a month away. But the English always do things differently from everyone else and I shouldn’t really have been surprised to hear (from the vicar) that November the 5th is all about some man who tried to blow up the King of England and got hanged for it. Now, for some unaccountable reason, they make a big doll and burn it on the anniversary of the day. Why not hang it? I suppose burning is more exciting.
    Rasmus bought fireworks for the boys and we had a bonfire, though we didn’t have a Guy Fawkes. I promised to make one for them next year. They are all over Rasmus,