Read Asta's Book for Free Online Page A

answering machine was on but still I went up. By the time I had closed the rear of the doll’s house, switched off the light and locked the door behind me, the ringing had stopped, I could hear my own voice saying I wasn’t available and then a woman’s unfamiliar voice.
    She had wasted no time, whoever she was, the features editor of a magazine I had only vaguely heard of. She was interested in the future of the diaries now Swanny Kjær was dead. Having heard that there were not only diaries yet untranslated but that extracts from the early diaries had been suppressed, she wanted to know if I as their new possessor would be publishing them. However, she would call me back next day.
    I switched off the machine and the phone rang immediately. It was Mrs Elkins. She had been at the funeral but we had scarcely exchanged a word. Would I want her to continue cleaning the house in Willow Road? I said, yes, please, and resisted uttering a panicky cry: Don’t leave me! The nurses, presumably, would know their services were no longer required and some time or other a huge bill would arrive. Thinking of them brought back in a too-vivid picture Swanny’s deathbed and I wondered how long it would take to erase that from my memory, the sight of her rearing up in bed and crying, ‘Nobody, nobody …’
    I banished it, temporarily, by concentrating on my plans for her memorial stone. I sat down and drew a gravestone, though I can’t draw, and wrote on it a line from Eliot: ‘There is no end, but addition’, her dates, 1905–1988, and her name as Swanny Kjær. Her name in full no one ever used except occasionally Torben. I was grown up before I knew what it was.
    Another ringing from the phone interrupted me. For a moment I couldn’t place the plummy voice and the name Gordon meant nothing. But when he said we’d talked a couple of hours before I knew it was the young man with the rich full blush and the black overcoat. As soon as I heard his name I remembered his sister’s: Gail. They were Gordon and Gail.
    ‘My second cousin,’ I said.
    He wouldn’t have that. He spoke gravely, as if it was of serious importance. ‘No, no, your first cousin once removed. You see, my father was your first cousin.’
    ‘Right. And your child, when you have one, will be my first cousin twice removed.’
    ‘Oh, I shan’t have any children. I’m gay.’
    For one who blushed so easily, he said it with a calm unembarrassed casualness, as if he had been saying he was cold or English or a cricketer. Good. If this was the new way, I was glad.
    ‘What can I do for you, Gordon?’
    ‘I’m a genealogist. That is, I’m an amateur genealogist. By profession I’m a banker. And, just for the record, it’s pronounced gee-nee-a-logist, not gee-nee-o-logist. I always tell people because otherwise they get it wrong. I do family trees for people. I charge a thousand pounds a time.’
    I said faintly that I didn’t want a family tree.
    ‘No, no, I don’t suppose you do. I’m doing one for me. My father’s side, the male line. I thought you might give me some help. I wouldn’t take up much of your time, I promise you. I shall be going to Denmark for my summer holiday to trace our forebears there but I shall need a little information—‘he hesitated’—from someone on the spot. And I thought perhaps you’d let me have a look at the diaries.’
    ‘Three volumes are published. They’re published up to 1934.’
    ‘I meant the originals. I believe in going back to sources.’
    ‘They’re in Danish.’
    ‘I’ve a Danish dictionary. Perhaps sometime I could come and just take a look?’
    ‘Yes, well, sometime,’ I said.
    To avoid more inquiries, instead of switching the machine on to the answer mode I unplugged the phone and the extension. The quite irrational idea came into my head that this was just the night for someone to break into the house in Willow Road and steal the diaries. I had scarcely given them a thought while Swanny was