Great Granny Webster (11 page)

Stuttering because he was both embarrassed and enraged by the foolish situation in which he was continually being placed by Grandfather Dunmartin, the English footman tried to explain that all he wanted was to show her the wine list and the menus. On hearing this explanation, my grandmother would start to laugh and her uncombed curls would bob up and down while her frail body shook as she let forth hyena peals of derisive amusement. Her mocking laughter could always make the footman blush, for he realised perfectly well that she saw his whole mission with the menus as totally insane.

When she grew tired of ridiculing him, she would reach out with her thin bony arm and snatch the wine list and the menu cards from his hand. Ordering him to wait in the corridor, she would slam the door in his face with a childish vindictiveness. Sometimes she kept him waiting for over an hour before she opened it in order to hurl the menu cards into the passage hissing: “All we do is live to eat in this house!” or some such inappropriate remark. It would then be discovered that she had taken various coloured crayons and with careful vicious strokes scratched out the name of every single item of food that had been suggested to her.

At the time that Tommy Redcliffe first visited Dunmartin Hall, three red-headed local girls, called the McDougal sisters, were taking turns ineptly to do the cooking. They were young and scared and highly strung, and they had never grasped the most rudimentary principles of what they were required to do down in the ramshackle unmodernised kitchen of such a palatial house. The only definite instruction they had received since their arrival was that Grandfather Dunmartin wanted several alternative menus shown to his wife every morning. My grandfather liked the feeling that he was keeping up the traditional domestic routines which his dead mother had once insisted on. He therefore wanted the menus to be written out in French.

The McDougal sisters had no experience and were hardly capable of cooking anything much more complicated than bacon and eggs. They couldn't understand a word of French and therefore the task of writing out a series of differing menus in a foreign language was a daily torment to them. They got up at six-thirty and wasted a lot of time slowly copying out the names of various rich and refined dishes which they took from a French cookery book, often confusing the hors d'oeuvres with the entrées, for they had no idea what they were suggesting to my grandmother.

Although every day they obediently wrote out lists of pretentious courses on the stiff menu cards which were engraved with the Dunmartin coat of arms, it made not the slightest difference to them whether these cards were sent back to them covered with approving ticks or whether all their suggestions had been scratched out by the malign crayon strokes of their employer. They had very soon noticed that no one ever complained if the food they cooked had no relation to anything they had suggested to my grandmother. They found many of the procedures in this alien and sinister Anglo-Irish house baffling. They saw their job of writing out these menus as a difficult, silly, hollow formality which they would never understand the point of. When the cards were returned to them, they never bothered to look at them. They would be too preoccupied, like flustered sailors without a compass, floundering in indecision as they tried to make up their minds what they should cook for the Dunmartin dining-room. After much over-excited debate, just before lunch when the urgency of the situation forced them into action, they would nearly always agree on their favourite standbys—ham or pheasant. They preferred the latter, seeing it as an expensive and exotic food which was therefore the most suitable. They would go and get a few of these pre-cooked birds from the larder, throw them into a frying pan and then have them pompously carried by the butler to the dining-room—mahogany-coloured, rock-like objects swimming in a sauce of bacon fat.

Once when Tommy Redcliffe had caught a very bad cold, which he blamed entirely on the polar conditions prevailing in his bedroom at Dunmartin Hall, he had gone down to the kitchen to ask the McDougal sisters if they would make him a drink of hot lemon and honey. He had happened to arrive just at the moment when the footman was bringing them back their menus, and he had been startled and intrigued by the hostility and contempt with which the footman treated the three young cooks.

The youngest girl greeted the footman, but he refused to answer her. He stood there in the doorway of the kitchen glaring at all the sisters, and the lid of one of his pale fastidious eyes gave an irritable nervous twitch, as if rejecting the very sight of their chapped and flaking arms, their greasy aprons, their freckled noses and frizzy ginger curls. He was immensely eager to show them that he regarded them with disgust, that he found their accent unintelligible, and saw them as no more worthy of human respect than the ill-fed scruffy fowls that pecked and squawked in the Dunmartin chicken-runs. It was obvious that he considered the sluttish way the McDougal sisters kept their kitchen as not only repugnant but dangerous. He seemed unwilling even to cross its threshold and stood there in the doorway with the nostrils of his arrogant aquiline nose flaring as if they detected some poisonous smell.

Tommy Redcliffe still vividly remembered the expression of pure revulsion with which the footman's cold pale eye had looked at all the filthy pots and pans and other cooking utensils, at the bluebottles which were settling on the butter, the wasps which were struggling in various open pots of jam. Tommy Redcliffe too was alarmed at the sight of the fuzzy grey mould that had formed on an old pudding that was lying in a china bowl on the sticky and unscrubbed kitchen table. He was shaken by the state of the unswept stone-flagged floor, on which the corpse of a mouse was rotting quietly in the corner in a mousetrap, where everywhere there seemed to be the crunched carcases of pheasants which had been thrown, despite their sharp and choking bones, to the gun dogs and lay there littered with odd bits of withered cabbage and the peelings of potatoes and carrots.

Tommy Redcliffe doubted that the supercilious young footman would have dreamt of eating a mouthful of food which had been touched by the McDougal sisters. He suspected that the butler and the two footmen cooked their own private meals on a stove in their pantry, and that as my grandfather never bothered to check the household bills they most probably ordered themselves excellent meat from the local butcher, so that—not to mention the superb vintage wine they were always taking from the cellar—the three Englishmen fared very well.

“Take these,” the footman had suddenly snarled, throwing the menu cards on to the floor with a gesture of furious hostility and contempt. He might have been feeding some chickens with corn. He turned and strode away in his wellingtons, as if escaping from an inner region of hell.

Tommy Redcliffe noticed that the three McDougal sisters made not the slightest move to pick up the French menus. He also became aware that there were various other tattered old menu cards lying around with all the other refuse on the kitchen floor. He presumed that these were the ones that had been made out for my grandmother in the preceding week and that no one had yet got round to sweeping them up.

“Stuck-up bastard,” one of the McDougal sisters said in cheerful tones, as the black-uniformed figure of the English footman disappeared down the corridor. “It's always a great moment to see the back of him.”

The three redheads were very friendly and maternal to Tommy Redcliffe. They sympathised with his sore throat and his swollen glands, and they scurried off to find lemons, which one of them then squeezed on a disconcertingly unclean-looking squeezer. They advised him to put a drop of whisky with it. “Whisky takes the pain out of most things,” the least freckled-nosed of the sisters said.

Tommy Redcliffe had found them all very likeable, and he had admired the way they seemed to be able to take the footman's rudeness so lightly. He had still been keen to get out of the kitchen, for he dreaded the thought of watching them preparing their pheasants.

The three young cooks never received any criticism for the terrible meals they produced, and Tommy Redcliffe felt that this was disastrous, for it gave them the idea that everyone found their cooking satisfactory. The McDougal sisters apparently had a very hazy and inaccurate image of my grandmother. From the moment they had come to work in her house they had never set eyes on her, because their kitchen was separated by a cobbled courtyard and a labyrinthine maze of corridors from the parts of the house that she used. They had heard rumours that she was a fierce and peculiar woman, and the whole idea of her frightened them. But though they were lost and unhappy working at Dunmartin Hall, they were only too aware of the unemployment in Ulster and were anxious to please her. As my grandmother never once complained about their ludicrous cuisine, any meal that they assumed had met with her approval they liked to repeat. They had little confidence in themselves, and the reason their culinary repertoire was so small was that they considered all variation risky. Therefore they liked to reproduce almost exactly the same thing they had cooked for lunch for the Dunmartin dinner.

Although my father never grumbled about the food, he never attempted to eat it either. He smoked restlessly all through meals and shook his head irritably whenever the butler tried to serve him. He was obviously embarrassed by the cooking of the McDougal sisters, and it was clear that he felt profoundly ashamed that it was all that he was able to offer to his friend. He never mentioned it to Tommy Redcliffe, and he never tried to apologise for it, presumably because he saw it, like many other things in his family situation, as irremediable and beyond apology.

One day when the food had been so exceptionally repulsive that one of the old aunts had rushed from the Dunmartin table with a handkerchief pressed to her lips, claiming that she had been poisoned, Tommy Redcliffe had tried as tactfully as possible to suggest to his host that it might be better if he went through the daily menus himself, rather than allow the burden of choice to fall on my grandmother, when she was clearly in no state to preoccupy herself with the meals of the household. He found it astonishing that a man so apparently good-natured as my grandfather seemed content to allow such a needlessly painful and farcical daily ritual as the presentation of the French menus to continue, when alternative arrangements were so easy.

He had never thought that Grandfather Dunmartin would be upset by this common-sense suggestion. But the poor man looked so close to tears that Tommy Redcliffe felt he had been both cruel and needlessly impertinent.

“I'm afraid you are right,” Grandfather Dunmartin said. “For a long time I've known that my poor darling wasn't really well enough to go through the menus, but I've been terrified of doing anything to upset her shaky confidence.”

He then tried to explain that my grandmother knew that, as his wife, it was her traditional right to choose the meals for the dining-room. He felt that if he was to take this little responsibility away from her, it might have a very bad psychological effect, for she would take it as a sign that she was generally considered too hopelessly incompetent to take on the most routine of the duties expected of her. “Once she feels we don't even trust her to choose our food—how can she feel we trust her to do anything?” he asked.

He had never felt, he said, that it was the least bit important whether she looked at the menus or not. All that mattered was that she be given daily symbolic evidence that her friends and family retained respect for her as the woman who was in charge of the household. “Meals appear anyway,” he said. “You can't pretend that any of us are starving. The servants always produce something. That's their job ...”

Staring with despondency and a certain bitterness at the leg of horrible fossil-like pheasant which was congealing in a pool of tepid bacon fat on his plate, Tommy Redcliffe had realised that his host felt too unhungry and too obsessed by his more disquieting concerns to care any longer what food appeared on his table. He found it comic that Grandfather Dunmartin seemed to regard the opportunity of choosing from the French menus as some important honour which he was conferring on his wife. He found it tragic that, against all evidence to the contrary, his host still managed to persist in his fantasy that this honour meant a great deal to her.

“Oh dear!” Grandfather Dunmartin said to him. “I suppose I'd better go through those menus for a while. I just hope to God she won't think I'm trying to insult her. I'll try to explain to her I'm only doing it temporarily until she feels more like her old self.” He said he felt sure he would manage the menus very badly. “I'll never understand all that French. I'll probably get confused and think
crème brûlée
is a sauce you put on cauliflower! In the old days, French was something my wife never had any trouble with. Old Mrs Webster was very strict about education and always got her the best French governesses. Anyway, in lots of ways women are always much cleverer than men, don't you think?”

The day after this conversation, he told the English footman that his wife felt unwell and it was better not to bother her with the menus. He never asked to see them, and the McDougal sisters soon ceased to write out any and cooked the same kind of food that they had always cooked.

At the time Tommy Redcliffe had stayed at Dunmartin Hall as a guest, my grandmother could still sometimes seem quite pleasant and normal. “Her tragedy was—she could never keep it up ...”

She lived to a quite different time-schedule from anyone else in the house. Often she stayed in her room for a large part of the day and only came out to roam restlessly around the house at night. Sometimes she would suddenly appear in the dining-room when everyone was in the middle of a meal, greeting her husband and her son and her guests very vaguely, as if she barely recognised them and yet was glad to find some company. She would sit down at the table and make general conversation. For a while she would be quite lucid, and an infectious feeling of hope would surge through everyone present. Perhaps she was better ... But then she would get on to the subject of elves and fairies.