Great Granny Webster (2 page)

The graveyard ending Blackwood devised for
Great Granny Webster
is no less ironic, but its final scene turns on a striking poetic figure. The officiating priest's skin becomes “bright violet blue” with cold as he recites the burial prayers, and Great Granny undergoes a final and unexpected transfiguration. The narrator, survivor and witness, stands musing in the freezing air, the only other mourner her great- grandmother's maid, one eye obscured by a black patch, the other weeping.

—H
ONOR MOORE

TO NATALYA, GENIA, IVANA, SHERIDAN AND CAL

I
WAS SENT
to stay with her two years after the war had ended, but in her house it seemed to be war-time. Her blinds and curtains were often drawn even during the day as if she was still preserving some kind of conscientious “black-out.” I think she was more frightened of the sun than she had ever been of German raids. She owned gloomy and valuable Persian carpets and it seemed to be her terror that some stray and sneaking sunbeam would creep in and make them fade.

The house of Great Granny Webster gave out the same damp feeling of cold that one experiences in many churches. We used to eat our meals on trays in front of the fire, but the chill of those meals was increased by the fact that for reasons of economy the fire was laid but never lit. In a period of post-war austerity Great Granny Webster managed to make the meals she served seem far more austere and rationed than anyone else's. This had something to do with the way her food was always served on her own priceless silver, which was polished every day in the basement by a crippled maid whom she called by her surname, Richards.

Great Granny Webster's tiny pats of margarine, when they were carried in by Richards laid out on a large silver engraved butter-dish, looked so diminished by their expensive setting as to appear almost non-existent. The saccharine she always served instead of sugar looked equally shamed and reduced by the immensely valuable bowl that held it, and the same diminishment would befall her stingy and minute portions of rubbery, unseasoned canned spaghetti which only seemed to speck the huge gleaming surface of the banquet platter on which it would appear—looking much less like food than some unfortunate little accident that flawed the beauty of her silver, a tiny whitish excrescence that Richards should have cleaned.

I had hardly met Great Granny Webster before I was sent to stay with her. The real reasons why such a person ever agreed when my mother asked her to have me as her guest, I was never to know. Possibly her idiosyncratic notion of family duty made her feel that it would be incorrect to refuse to allow a great-grandchild to convalesce under her roof, provided it was accepted that her presence must in no way interfere with the implacable and placid flow of her carefully chosen lifestyle.

The first morning I arrived at her house, gauche and schoolgirlishly shy and lugging a suitcase, she was sitting in half-darkness in her drawing-room. She hardly greeted me. She said that she trusted that I had had a good train journey, and that Richards would show me up to my room.

“Luncheon will be served at one-thirty,” she said. This normal remark was uttered like a deadly threat. “I hope you realise that I insist on punctuality.”

Great Granny Webster told me that she would prefer it if I stayed up in my room until lunch was served, but that she had no real objection if I came down to sit with her in her drawing-room, as long as I knew how to entertain myself.

I was then fourteen years old. I had just had a minor operation in London. When I came out of hospital I was suffering from severe anaemia and my doctors had told my mother that I would recover much more quickly if I had sea air. Great Granny Webster had been asked if she would have me to stay with her only because she lived five minutes from the sea.

At the beginning I had been delighted to hear that I was considered an invalid and that I was going to be sent to stay with her for two months. When I told my Aunt Lavinia she said, “I'll cross my fingers for you, darling,” and I had no idea what she meant. At that time I was convinced that there was nothing worse in life than being at my boarding-school; but from the first moment I walked through Great Granny Webster's huge forbidding black front door, which had a hideous stained-glass covered porch full of potted plants that had to be watered day and night by Richards, I was starting to revise this opinion.

“You realise that it was your mother who asked me if I would take you in to stay with me,” Great Granny Webster said at the first difficult and sparse lunch we had together. “Your mother claims that you have been ill. From my experience it is always better to make young people learn to conquer their illnesses and pursue their studies. Lately it seems that no one any longer agrees with me ...”

Great Granny Webster gave a heaving sigh and glared irritably into the grate of her unlit fire. Then she added:

“If your father had not given his life in active service for a cause he vitally believed in ... I have to say I might very well not have gone along with the demands your mother has decided to make on me. But since you are here ... you are here. All I trust is that someone has taught you how to divert yourself.”

We were served two disgusting little courses by Richards before Great Granny Webster chose to speak to me again.

“What is that garment you are wearing?” she asked.

“It's my school blazer.”

“Blazer?” she repeated. “Blazer?” Her tiny mouth twisted with disgust and she managed to make the word sound like some foul and crude expletive. “Fortunately I don't know these modern terms. One thing that I
do
know is that whatever you are wearing—you have outgrown it. Please look at your sleeves.”

I looked down at the sleeves of my school jacket, and I saw that there was quite a large expanse of wrist showing between my sleeve and my hand.

“I don't blame you personally for this,” Great Granny Webster added. “I entirely blame your mother. A growing girl outgrows things. I know that your mother is a war widow, but I still have to say that I find it quite unforgivable that she should have sent you to stay with me attired like this. There is really nothing more unattractive than the sight of a young woman displaying a repulsive amount of arm. I am not going to mention this subject again.”

Great Granny Webster always told the truth. She never once referred either to my sleeves or to my arms again.

At the beginning of my stay with her I saw her as little more than a depressing and formal ancient who was much too old for it to be possible for anyone to judge her by human standards. She was identical with all the rickety near-the-grave lady relations dressed in mourning who sometimes appeared in the houses of my school-friends. At that point all I knew about this woman and her effect was that already I was starting to count the minutes of the months that had to pass before I could escape from under her roof.

Although technically Great Granny Webster could provide sea air, because her house was in Hove, a suburb of Brighton, not a whiff of it ever seemed to be able to penetrate the musty interior with its sealed and heavily curtained Victorian windows. Living in her large cold villa I often felt that I was light-years away from the world I craved and she abominated: the world of the crowded Brighton beach, where children dug moats for sand-castles with elaborate turrets that had been cast out of painted tin pails, where what Great Granny Webster always referred to with a shiver as “trippers” lay, their over-white city bodies under a cold weak sun as they tried to get brown, or ate candy-floss and toffee-apples as they walked along the pier, on which there were Penny Arcades, Punch and Judy shows, Salvation Army bands and postcards of fat ladies in bathing suits.

I never once managed to get down to the Brighton beach in the two months I lived with Great Granny Webster. I could easily have gone without her, but she made me feel that as her guest it was my duty never to leave her side—as if I was her paid companion. The fact that there might be differences between us, not merely in age but also in taste, never troubled her. When she planned our days she planned that we should both do whatever she felt like doing, together.

Soon after I first arrived to stay with her and got to know her sedentary and rigidly unbending ways, I realised that it would be utterly disastrous to try to persuade her to go down to the Brighton beach. I don't think that she had even driven through the streets of Brighton for years—she saw the town as such a loathsome sink of modernism, vulgarity and vice, the total antithesis of the staid and wealthy gentility of Hove. The idea of trying to coax this grim and fiercely joyless old lady down to the windy Brighton beach, where she might easily have a heart attack just from the horror and the shock of being forced to step over the close-packed, half-naked bodies of “trippers,” was only too obviously inconceivable.

The Brighton beach was to remain for me like a gay and tempting paradise that was tantalisingly near and yet utterly impossible to reach. I never stopped thinking about it when she forced me to do the thing I found the dullest, the most disagreeable of all, in those unforgettably long and unamusing days I spent in her company—when she made me take drives with her in the afternoons.

Great Granny Webster knew that I was meant to need sea air, and this suited her very well because apparently she needed it herself. At four o'clock every afternoon a hired Rolls-Royce from a Hove car firm appeared at her door with a uniformed, unctuous chauffeur, who would then drive both of us, as if he was driving two royalties, at a slow creep along the bleak misty sea-front of Hove. To and fro, to and fro, we would drive for exactly an hour while one of the windows of the Rolls-Royce was wound down just enough to let in a very small sniff of salt and seaweed-smelling air.

There was something memorably awful about those pointless and monotonous afternoon drives in the vast, soft-wheeled, swaying black car with the silver emblem of a dashing sea-horse on its bonnet. In that car I felt that I was much too near to Great Granny Webster. Sealed off behind the glass partition that separated us from the driver, I felt that I could actually smell the acid scent of her old age—smell the sourness of her displeasure with everything, past, present and future.

I don't think that I have ever since met a human being who smiled more rarely, who found less in life to amuse her. She took a pride in her own lack of humour, as if she saw it as an upper-class Scottish virtue. If humour can sometimes be used as a defence against the whip-lash cuts of pain, failure, despair and loss, by reducing such things to absurdity, Great Granny Webster scorned to use any such shield, seeing it as a defence only suitable for “trippers.”

“Life is no joke,” she once said to me. “Life can never be much of a joke for the thinking person.”

When one was with her she could almost persuade one that there was something cowardly and despicable in any emotional dodging, in any refusal to experience every single blow that life could deal one, head-on. She could make one feel that there was an almost superhuman courage in the way she was not frightened to admit that the only thing she now hoped for from life was a continued consciousness, unpleasant as she well knew that it had to be. All she wanted from each new day that broke was the knowledge that she was still defiantly there—that against all odds she had still managed to survive in the lonely, loveless vacuum she had created for herself.

“I have nothing to live for any more,” she would murmur. I was always astonished by the way her tone sounded so smug and boastful. I found it impossible to understand how she could take such defiant pride in the fact that she had managed to keep existing in her disagreeable, large, cold villa in Hove without the slightest intellectual or emotional motivation, like a piece of dried-up antique brown moss that can mysteriously survive without water, simply by clinging to the hard cold surface of a rock.

Sometimes, cruising along with her in the Rolls-Royce, I felt I might suffocate just from being so enclosed with her. Although with her frugality she was happy to allow her house to be as chill as a morgue, she had a perverse terror of draughts and the tiny chink of air that was all she would allow into the car was never enough. I used to feel that she had sealed me off from the world forever. We were both like figures in a glass case in some museum separated from everything that was alive by the closed windows and the glass of the Rolls-Royce's partition. Inside that car there was nothing to breathe except her silent and stoical despondency.

“Very disappointing weather,” Great Granny Webster would say finally to the chauffeur, having been driven for an hour totally silent, and very upright, with the usual pained expression on her long lugubrious face and her knees tightly wrapped in a tartan rug.

“Very disappointing, Mrs Webster. It started nice this morning—but now I'm afraid it seems to be clouding over.”

“Well, I think that will really be quite enough for one day. Could you please now drive us home.”

After the glare on the sea-front her house never appeared darker than when we got back from our afternoon drives. It seemed like a great gloomy, mysterious shrine that had been piously erected to commemorate something even more gloomy and mysterious than itself. It was as if every object that it contained had been chosen merely because it was heavy, expensive and sombre. Great Granny Webster seemed to hate colours. Almost everything she owned was either black or dark brown.

“You can read now,” she would say, pointing to a chair as we came into her icy, ill-lit drawing-room. “Dinner will not be served until seven.” And the rest of the evening would stretch in front of me as dark as her furniture, like a pitch-black tunnel that would never end.

Great Granny Webster always liked to see me read while she sat hour after hour doing nothing in her drawing-room.

“I'm glad to see a young person who still enjoys reading good books,” she would say. “Nowadays no one seems to want to read anything worthwhile any more.”