Great Granny Webster

by Caroline Blackwood

  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.

  “He has bad blood!” my grandmother started screaming. “Can’t you see that I’m doing it for him? Can’t you see it’s much better for the poor little creature if I smash out his tiny brains against a stone!”

  My grandmother had finally been overpowered by the sheer weight and force of so many resolute and trained nannies. The baby had been saved, for they had managed to wrench him out of my grandmother’s hands, while his close relations and the visiting friends of his relations stood there frozen, taking not the slightest action, they were all so immobilised by the surprise and horror of the whole situation and by their refusal to believe that such an event could not but be a hideous hallucination.

  Later, Cousin Kathleen told me, it seemed almost as if nothing had happened. The infant was safe. The christening was performed as it had always been meant to be performed in the family chapel. My brother was baptised in special water that someone had been paid to bring over in a bottle from the River Jordan. There was nothing in the least odd about the ceremony, except that my grandmother never attended it. While it was going on she stayed shut up in her room with the blinds drawn.

  The next day no one saw her. She got up before anyone in the house party woke. The butler said that Sir Robert and Lady Dunmartin had decided to take the early boat back to England.

  “What happened to her after that?” I asked. Cousin Kathleen didn’t know. After the disastrous Ulster visit she had never set eyes on my grandmother again. Indeed she had taken care to avoid her. All she had heard were family rumours that the poor woman seemed to be getting worse and worse. She had no idea where my grandmother had been put in the end.

  “I never thought your grandmother was quite normal even when she was young,” Cousin Kathleen told me. “It never really surprised me when I heard that she had ended up in a lunatic asylum. Even when your grandfather first married her, although she was very pretty and enchanting, rather like an elf, I never quite liked her being so fey. When I look back now, I think there was always something very wrong with her—although somehow one accepted it at the time, she was so vivacious and delicate-looking, and if she wished she could be very charming. When I think back now—there was something slightly peculiar about a newly married young woman who insisted she had to walk alone round the damp cold woods of Dunmartin at midnight because she had learned the secret of talking to the trees.”

  “Was Great Granny Webster there when her daughter went mad at the christening?” I asked.

  “Of course she was there,” Cousin Kathleen answered. “Naturally your great-grandmother travelled over to Ulster for such an occasion—a woman like that only lives in order to be correct. Naturally she went over for the baptism of her first male great-grandchild.”

  “What did she do when my grandmother picked up the baby?”

  “She didn’t do anything. As far as I know in all her life that woman has never done anything. She just stood watching the whole terrifying scene without having any visible reaction. I can see her now in her black turban hat all dressed up in special black furs and shoes as if she was dressed for a funeral rather than a christening. She looked imposed-upon and disapproving, but then that was nothing new. For as long as I have known her she has always looked that way. Afterwards she never mentioned her daughter’
s behaviour—no hint of an apology.”

  “But what do you think she felt underneath?” I asked. I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel that she was taking a dangerous risk with her upright spine when circumstances forced her to bend over and kiss her great-grandchildren. She always managed to indicate that these kisses were very distasteful to her, and she would take care only to hold her cold pursed mouth against our fore-heads for the most fleeting of seconds. Then she would instantly straighten up, looking just a little bit more martyred and weary than usual, and at once start irritably adjusting her black hat and her furs.

  “What did she secretly feel?” Cousin Kathleen repeated the question. “What a silly thing to ask me! When you have a dour old piece of Scottish granite like your great-grandmother —how can you tell what a woman like that secretly feels?”

  And marooned with Great Granny Webster in her drawing-room I found I could never guess what she was thinking as she sat there silently on her chair. She was not in the least senile. She could truthfully boast that her brain was now as active as it had ever been. What did that active brain think about all day long? What did it think about in the nights, for she claimed she hardly slept? When she sat there frowning, were her thoughts taking her back to some uniquely disagreeable moment in her past which engrossed her to a point at which she temporarily forgot the terrible tedium of her present? Was her brain trying to think up wily stratagems which might help her avoid the unpromising possibilities of her future?

  I sometimes wondered if she ever gave a thought to her daughter, as she sat there glowering and stirring the saccharine in her coffee. I had the feeling that she was totally immune to the fate of anyone except herself, that her ego was totally concentrated on her own pugnacious struggle for survival. If her daughter existed for her at all any longer, I had the suspicion that she existed only as a threat to the life-thread to which Great Granny Webster clung so tenaciously. My grandmother was obviously seen as a repugnant topic, and only as such could she still ripple across the consciousness of her ancient mother. Great Granny Webster had arranged her whole life so that she would very rarely be confronted by topics she found undesirable. I never once dared to bring up the subject of my grandmother. As a guest of Great Granny Webster I found that I soon became dominated by the sheer determination of her wishes. I steered clear of any subjects that might displease her, fearing, just as she did, that distasteful topics might actually endanger her. She never referred to it, but all the time I was with her she managed to convey a silent warning that if one was to say anything incorrect and tactless it might be perilously bad for her heart.

  It seemed to be her heart that Great Granny Webster really lived for. Her own heart was all she cared about. She had produced three generations of descendants and lived to know that none of them could have the slightest importance to her, any more than all the leaves that have flown yearly from its branches can have much importance to an aged oak.

  Her heart was all she valued. She was like a miser in the way she kept perpetual guard over it, counting every step she took, saving herself from physical exercise in the same way that she rationed food. For her own heart she was prepared to suffer. If she was excruciatingly bored by all the hours she forced herself to remain inactive in her chair she felt compensated by her own thrifty feeling that all the while she was hoarding the energy of her heart like someone hoarding fuel.

  If she hated living in Hove that hardly mattered to someone whose primary interest was the pampering of the invisible organ that lay behind the bones of her thin flat chest. There was very little noise in Hove. Hove was a very quiet place indeed. Hove had very good sea air. Hove was as good a place as any for someone who only asked to be allowed to watch over the welfare of her own heart as if she had been entrusted with some kind of sacred mission.

  When I first arrived to stay with Great Granny Webster she had told me that the only human being she had spoken to for months was Richards. I knew that when I left her house she would revert to the dispiriting sole company of Richards without hardly registering that I had been there and had gone.

  If Great Granny Webster had been lonely in the past and would be just as lonely in the future, I had little doubt that she would manage to bear it bravely. She would remind herself that she had been skilful at avoiding all the pressures that could be imposed on her by human company—pressures that could only be obnoxious to her because of the strain they might put on her aged and egotistical heart.

  Sometimes, sitting in Great Granny Webster’s deadening presence, I would think about my grandmother, and the eccentricities of that unknown, faceless woman would begin to be much more intelligible to me. If one had been doomed to be born and raised under the teak-like auspices of Great Granny Webster’s affections, it might be quite easy to develop a predilection for talking to the trees.

  “I am a fighter,” Great Granny Webster told me. “I have no respect for people who don’t put up a good fight in life.”

  It was true that in a sense she was a fighter, but I couldn’t respect her for it. All that had kept her so long on this earth appeared to be her inhuman immobility. She often seemed to be trying to use her hard chair as camouflage, as if she hoped that Death might enter her drawing-room and leave again, tricked by her tactics—that he would think he had already taken her, she showed so much less sign of life than her wooden chair.

  “You are very quiet for a young person,” she suddenly remarked one day.

  Indeed I had long ago given up trying to talk to her. We had absolutely nothing in common. She preferred to spend most of her days in silence. When she occasionally chose to speak some short sentence, I hardly ever answered.

  I nodded politely.

  “People might say that you are much too quiet, that you are much too retiring,” she continued. “But I hope they will never persuade you to lose those qualities. I was always very quiet as a girl. I have never been a person who has seen the point of a lot of chatter. I am very glad that you know how to keep yourself to yourself. You get that from me.”

  Just occasionally one of her mournful little soliloquies would really succeed in shocking me. I think she had no idea how much she chilled me when she tried to reassure me that she was certain I would turn out to be exactly like her.

  “I have decided that I am going to leave you my bed,” she told me one day. “I was planning to leave it to your father—but now that the poor man has been killed in action, I have decided that the correct thing is for me to leave it to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.” I didn’t know what one was meant to say to something like this. “That’s really very kind of you,” I repeated. “Thank you very much indeed.”

  “As you know, it is a four-poster,” she said. “And I have to warn you that one of the ornamental pineapples on one of its posts is a little loose and it tends to fall off if the bed is shaken. Once I have passed away it worries me that the moving men may be careless when they move it into storage. I would therefore like you to be there when all my possessions are disposed of. I want you to realise that there are no reliable furniture removal firms any more. Now-a-days they send just anybody. All you get is a couple of rough young men with no breeding at all, no sense of the way one is meant to handle beautiful possessions. I therefore want someone responsible to be there to supervise the movers when they come to take my things from my house.”

  I sat there nodding.

  “If you could be ultra-careful to see they don’t somehow manage to loosen the pineapple and lose it. I am asking you for your own sake just as much as my own, because I warn you—if that carved pineapple gets lost, the bed will lose most of its period value. You will discover these hand-carved things are totally irreplaceable.”

  I just nodded again with my teeth tightly clenched, det
ermined not actually to promise her aloud that I would come down to Hove after her death personally to supervise the removal of her furniture.

  As I sat there quietly, keeping myself to myself, in the very way that she admired, in my mind I was already making frantic plans as to how I could sell her bed. With or without the pineapple, I felt obsessed by a longing to dispose of it. Surely there had to be furniture salesrooms in Hove. The idea of ever owning, let alone of sleeping in, her huge four-poster, with its dingy purple hangings which you could draw until the bed turned into a square fusty tent sealed off from all light and air, appalled me.

  For me, her dreaded bed could only always smell of her decay and decrepitude and loneliness. It was a bed that would seem forever haunted by the terrible insomniac nights that I knew this old woman had passed in it.

  “I am very glad to have brought this matter up with you,” she said. “It’s been on my mind for a long time.”

  I nodded again. I was thinking that I was lucky that apparently she hadn’t decided to leave me her chair.

  It was Richards who was going to inherit her chair. There may have been some element of one-upmanship in the choice of the high-backed object she finally bequeathed to this cripple, as if from the grave she wished to rebuke and remind the bent Richards that faultless posture was a sign of good breeding, that it was a virtue worth cultivating at all cost, if in old age one was to reap the dignity of its rewards.

  But it was going to be fifteen years before I inherited her undesirable bed, before Richards received her useless chair. I never imagined this when Great Granny Webster came to Brighton station to say goodbye to me when my two months of breathing sea air with her were finally over. Never had I seen her look so frighteningly ravaged and fragile as when she stood there exposed in the harsh light of the station. For the first time I understood why she liked to keep her curtains drawn.