Great Granny Webster (3 page)

Although she liked the idea of people reading good books, she had none herself. The books in her house were all on angling or nautical subjects. I sometimes wondered if she had them on her shelves as mementoes because her dead husband had once liked them. I also wondered if she had not chosen them herself because they matched everything else in her house—they were all so expensively bound, so dingy and brown.

Once a week, on the way back home from our seafront drives, she would allow me to stop at the Hove library. I noticed that she had not the slightest interest in looking at the titles of any of the books I chose. When I was sitting with her in her drawing-room reading hectic romantic historical novels, she automatically assumed that what I was reading must be “worthwhile.” She saw me as her descendant, and although I very much disliked the idea of being in any way related to anyone so old, and arid, and charmless, she was convinced that a taste for “good things” had to have been passed down as if by a law of nature, from her, to me, in my blood.

When Great Granny Webster used the word “nowadays,” she always stressed and separated each syllable and managed to make it sound like some lethal poison which was responsible for destroying everything in the universe that she had once found a little good.

“
Now-a-days
no one appreciates beautiful pictures any more,” she would murmur. She herself owned only a few dull and undistinguished portraits of her own dead ancestors. One or two pompous, fierce-faced men in wigs and some ladies with wistful expressions stared down from her walls. She seemed to have deliberately decided never to clean any of her pictures, and time had darkened their varnish until they suited her perfectly. Her portraits hardly stood out against the stark oak of her panelling—all their colours had turned to such a sombre brown.

Often I would be in the same room as Great Granny Webster for hours and she would say not a single word to me. She would just sit there bolt upright in one of the most horribly uncomfortable highbacked wooden Victorian gothic chairs I have ever seen. It was a chair that appeared never to have been designed for human use. One felt that originally it had only ever been intended to stand like a decoration in some imposing baronial hall.

But hour after hour Great Granny Webster would just sit there in this chair while she stared silently in front of her with woebegone and yellowy pouched eyes. Then sometimes after meals had been served she would wait for the crippled figure of Richards to go limping out of the room, and she would suddenly start to make a few bleak and deadpan statements without appearing to expect any answer. I had the feeling that if I had not been with her, she would still have made the same remarks aloud to herself.

“Now-a-days,” she would suddenly say, “people have been spoiled. They don't want to be servants any more. It's all the fault of the war. It's this last beastly war that has given them all such a taste for working in munitions.”

She would take some saccharine from her silver sugar-bowl and drop it carefully into her tiny china coffee-cup and stir it slowly until it dissolved. She never took more than one frugal little tablet. She often told me she could not abide waste.

“I know exactly how to answer them, when now-a-days they ask me how I would like to be
their
servant!”

She would pause dramatically, like an actress who expects to be clapped for her line. Her pursed little discontented mouth would give a twitch, the only movement it seemed able to make that faintly resembled a smile.

“Poor silly things! I know exactly how to answer that! If I ever had to be their servant—I would only be the most excellent servant!”

I would stare at her blankly, trying to imagine her melancholy elongated face wearing the same old-fashioned parlourmaid's cap that she made Richards wear. I would try to imagine her stately, static old body galvanising itself and leaving its high-backed chair in order frantically to polish and mop and scour.

Maybe she could do it. I was never certain. She spoke with such conviction I could never be sure that she might not have more hidden strengths than she ever chose to demonstrate—that when she made these surprising claims they might not in fact be true.

In some pessimistic and weary way servants intrigued her. When she started to make some of her flat, bleak utterances, she quite often referred to servants.

“All my life I have always refused to have any alcohol in the house. When one has servants—it's just not worth it. Why run the risk? Why tempt them?”

She always spoke as if she had so many servants. When we sat there together in the evenings sipping our glasses of water, she could make it seem as if we were craftily outwitting, not just the crippled Richards, but a huge thirsty thieving staff.

Richards had been with Great Granny Webster for over forty years and her presence added to, rather than relieved, the gloom of the house. At some point in her life she appeared to have had a fearful accident to her eye, for it was always covered with a large black patch.

Richards was apparently slightly younger than Great Granny Webster, but all the years of working for her had aged her so crushingly that when they were together Richards made my great-grandmother seem like a light-footed girl.

Whereas Great Granny Webster was proud of her faultless upright posture and boasted that in childhood her parents had made her spend several hours a day with a hard board strapped to her back, Richards was bent over double and her black-patched face, with grey whiskers sprouting on its chin, would peer crookedly out at the world from under the hump of her deformed arthritic shoulder.

It always frightened me to see the bent and crippled Richards dragging herself up and down Great Granny Webster's great flights of steep dark stairs, carrying stone hotwater bottles, brushes, brooms, and tea-trays, mops and heavy pails.

Richards cooked all our meals down in the cellar-basement, which I could never bring myself to visit and hardly dared imagine. Puffing and wheezing and scarlet-faced with the strain, Richards would somehow manage painfully to lug up our food to the drawing-room on a heavy Edwardian mahogany butler's tray.

When Richards had finally succeeded in serving our meals, Great Granny Webster always thanked her, and there was something excessively brave in her tones as if it had been a painful and gallant effort for her even to speak. She would be sitting there with such a dreadful look of exhaustion and discomfort on her face that she managed to upstage Richards, and she could make one feel that Richards's feat with the butler's tray and the terrible basement stairs was not all that remarkable if one remembered that from early morning Great Granny Webster had sat in courageous, stoical silence, enduring without complaint the agonising discomfort of her hard-backed chair.

I wondered how she contrived to bear that chair without screaming. Obviously it made her suffer. You only had to see the grim and yet resolute look on her face when she sat there in it. Her tall thin body looked so unnaturally strained and tense you felt that at any moment it might suddenly crack in half, broken by the effort of trying to keep itself so stiff and still and upright.

It was like a severe endurance test the way that old lady stayed for so many hours a day in that horrendous chair. Except when we took drives in the afternoon, she rarely ever left it. Her only respite was the few minutes before lunch when she took a little health walk. She would step along beside me, very silent, very straight-backed and sedate, wearing her usual expression of pained forbearance, as we both went, much too slowly, down to the lamp-post which lay at the end of her hushed and leafy
cul-de-sac
of a street.

Sometimes I would examine her as if she were some kind of stuffed object when she was sitting in her chair and staring with despondent eyes at the brown of her own panelling as though she had quite forgotten I was with her. I would wonder if it was old age that had caused something to go wrong with her skin's pigmentation, if that would explain why both her sallow cheeks were streaked with peculiar blotches of brown. I wondered why she had arranged her hair in two grey tufts that lay on her forehead like a couple of curly horns, so that what with the exaggerated narrowness of her elongated face, and her uniquely over-long upper-lip, she often reminded me of a melancholy and aged ram.

“I am very fortunate. I still enjoy excellent health,” she would say. But I could never see that she was in any way to be envied. What use was her good health if the only way she had found to enjoy it was to spend her days sitting alone in a big ugly villa in Hove stoically enduring the unnecessary discomfort of a hard-backed chair?

“I am very fortunate,” she would say. “I still retain perfect use of all my faculties.” And I wondered what use to her were all her well-preserved faculties, since she used them to so little purpose and had chosen to spend the end of her life in such a state of total idleness that now all she could take a pride in was the forbearance with which she endured her own unlifting discontent and ennui.

“I have never been happy living in England,” she remarked one day. “I don't think anyone who has been born in Scotland can ever have a moment's happiness living in England.”

I wondered why on earth she didn't move back to Scotland. Although she loved frugality and economy, she was an immensely wealthy woman. I found it quite impossible to understand what she now felt was keeping her in the genteel, somnolent streets of Hove, why she was eking out her life as if in exile in a land she had always loathed.

I could see nothing to keep her in this stagnant suburb, except her passion for pointless suffering and her general inertia. Her husband had been dead for years. “None of the family ever come down here to visit me any more.” She had apparently not made one single local friend in all the years she had been living in this villa. I had the feeling that even her own contemporaries would find it extremely hard to make a friend of Great Granny Webster. She was not at all friendly.

I noticed that there was one black crow of an old woman to whom Great Granny Webster nodded when we went on Sundays to the service at the Hove church. But this woman never seemed to make any effort to invite her to tea, and all the time I stayed there I never saw Great Granny Webster receive a personal letter. Her telephone never once rang.

Sometimes in my mind I would try to move her up to Scotland. Would she really like it better there—she who took such a pride in just existing without liking anything? I could only think that if she was sitting alone on top of a rocky crag in the ice-cold turret of some granite Scottish castle, the way she chose to sit all day long in a grim motionless position, as if she was permanently on guard waiting for the arrival of something that she dreaded, might conceivably seem a little more motivated. If, instead of sitting in suburban Hove staring fiercely at her own brown panelling, she was to spend her days staring out through an arrow hole and gazing down the grey sweep of some misty glen, would she not have more dignity, purpose and function? In such a situation she might be thought to be keeping resolute guard over her own demesne, trying to spy out the approach of an enemy clan. I found it easy to imagine Richards limping up from the castle dungeons and bringing Great Granny Webster plates of hot porridge as she sat in her turret observing her silent, non-stop vigil. Whenever I visualised Richards hobbling up winding stairs that had been hacked out of cold raw stone, I always saw her as having discarded her parlour-maid's uniform, and she would be wearing a tam-o'-shanter, a sporran and a kilt.

It was when I was staying in my great-grandmother's villa in Hove that I began to be curious about my grandmother. In all the weeks I spent with her Great Granny Webster never made a single remark to suggest that she had ever had a daughter. She was not a woman one could easily imagine as having given birth to a child; her whole personality and aura reeked of barrenness.

I noticed that Great Granny Webster had no photographs of her daughter in her house. In fact she had no photographs of anyone or anything at all. It was as if no person or place from her past had ever pleased her enough to make her want to preserve a recorded image that could remind her that it had existed.

Staying with her in Hove, I began to have nightmares in which I thought my missing and unmentioned grandmother Dunmartin was standing in my bedroom. She always came as a horrifying witch-like spectre, cursing and gibbering, and grimacing. She was eerie; she was evil; her intentions were entirely malevolent. Every time I dreamt about her I woke up shivering.

Sitting with Great Granny Webster in the evenings, I longed to ask her where my grandmother was. I knew she was still alive. Great Granny Webster must know where her daughter was living at the moment; she must know what had finally happened to her.

If Great Granny Webster would only talk about it, my grandmother might become less unreal and terrifying to me. This melancholy old woman's deliberate refusal to mention my grandmother's name only increased the fearful distortion of my image of her. If even her name could not be mentioned in this church-like house, Great Granny Webster must see her daughter's very existence as some fiendish obscenity.

When my grandmother Dunmartin came and stood by my bed in Hove she came as an ugly fragmented phantom concocted from whispers and snippets of gossip that I had heard as a child and then deliberately tried to forget because they had frightened me. “The poor creature had to be put away in the end—it was all very tragic ...”

I had met my grandmother once, but I had been so young I couldn't remember her. I had never been allowed to meet her after my brother's christening, an occasion of which I remembered nothing except the taste of the marzipan on the huge, tiered, stork-adorned cake. Living in the dark house of the woman who had given birth to her, I kept remembering the story my elderly cousin Kathleen had told me about my grandmother's behaviour at the christening. My grandmother Dunmartin had travelled over to Ulster for the ceremony and she had made an attack on the baby. My brother had been lying in an antique cradle dressed up in his bonnet and white lace christening clothes. All of a sudden my grandmother had become very agitated, and without much warning had run up to the cradle and grabbed the baby. Her face looked vicious, twisted and weirdly unpleasant. She had been half-laughing, half-crying when she lifted him high above her head so that the long skirts of his white robes were dangling down pitifully like washing. Apparently she frightened him by the way she was holding him, for he went blue in the face and started bawling so loudly that his nanny, and his nursery maid, and various other visiting nannies and nursery maids who had come over with the guests for the christening, had rushed at my grandmother in a starchy-aproned pack and surrounded her as they struggled and wrestled to get the baby out of her grip.