Great Granny Webster

by Caroline Blackwood

  Once Aunt Lavinia was moved to her private room Dr Kronin soon came to visit her. She was asleep when he came in, because she had been given sedation, which made her feel very tired.

  She woke up to find herself in what she described as “a situation of total and unexpected nightmare.” Dr Kronin was bending over her bed. He was breathing heavily and kissing the bandages on her wrists. “Little fool,” he kept repeating in throttled amorous tones. “What made you do it?”

  She thought of screaming. She thought of slapping him across the face. But she felt too stunned to do anything. She closed her eyes, lay completely still and pretended she had gone back to sleep.

  “I think I must have been paralysed by rage,” Aunt Lavinia said. “I’ve rarely felt such secret fury as I felt at that moment. I literally wanted to kill that doctor. I’ve never felt quite such a strong blood-lust for any other human being. If I’d had a sharp implement to hand, I know that nothing could have saved Dr Kronin.”

  She had experienced his behaviour not only as a medical, but as a personal, violation of the most unforgivable nature. “He made me think that I was just about to burst a blood vessel,” Aunt Lavinia said. “It made me apoplectic to think that the same vile little man who had forbidden me to have a comb and a lipstick had dared to enter my private room in order to cover my bandages with his lascivious and perverted kisses.”

  In retrospect, Aunt Lavinia felt she had probably made a mistake in lying there for so long making no protest and pretending she was in a coma. She had hoped he might get bored and go away if he got no reaction from her, but her lack of response had in no way had the effect on him that she was praying for.

  “You know how some men seem to find unresponsive women very arousing. We must never forget about necrophiles. Well, unfortunately Dr Kronin seems to have been a man of that inclination ...”

  Dr Kronin had started imploring her to open her eyes, to say something to him. He told her how beautiful she was, that he had wanted her from the first moment he had seen her in the public ward. “Poor sick soul. You need help. And I’m just the one who knows how to give it to you. I’ve helped other women in the same state as you—they loved it ... If you just relax and let me do what I want to do to you I can make you feel much better.”

  Aunt Lavinia gave an exaggerated shudder. “Can you imagine the horror of having to listen to all that kind of insanity. I didn’t know how far he would dare to go. But I can tell you, darling, I felt petrified ...”

  Despite her shut eyes, it had been all too clear to Aunt Lavinia from the sounds Dr Kronin was making that he was working himself up. His breathing was becoming increasingly heavy and impassioned. He kept lifting her deliberately lead-heavy arms and covering them with his hot wet kisses. “Damn you,” he whispered. “Why do I find women suicides so exciting?”

  She said that having first felt she was burning up with rage she then started to feel ice-cold. She had the sensation that she was lying naked in the snow somewhere near the North Pole and that any part of her body he touched might easily drop off from frost-bite.

  She kept wondering whether it would bring Dr Kronin to his senses if she started screaming for the nurses.

  “But I was in this odiously weak position, darling. Remember, the only thing I wanted in the world was to be released from the hospital. So I knew I had to play it very cool and canny. I knew I must never forget that although Dr Kronin had shown every indication that he was completely round the bend he was still an august figure of medical authority, and he had me in his power. If I was to start screaming for help, I was scared stiff he might claim I had gone berserk and take revenge with his strait-jackets and brain-shocks ...”

  Dr Kronin’s next move had been to describe to her in detail all the things he wanted to do to her, and everything he said she found so distasteful and obscene she preferred not to repeat it to me. The thing she had found most enraging in his whole seductive approach was that every crude and obscene suggestion he made to her was presented with a nauseating sentimentality, as though he believed the help he was offering would be therapeutic.

  “You are ill. You mustn’t keep fighting me,” Dr Kronin had whispered.

  Aunt Lavinia found this admonition particularly absurd, considering the fact that he was addressing someone who so far had shown just about as much fighting spirit as a slab of industrial concrete.

  Suddenly, his breathing sounding as loud as the puffing of a steam-roller, Dr Kronin clambered right up on to her bed, which was extremely narrow and surgical and less like a bed than a stretcher. He then lay on top of her and started heaving up and down.

  “The whole scene was foul and foolish beyond belief,” Aunt Lavinia said. “But only now can I start to laugh about it. There he was, pointlessly humping and pumping away at the surface of my hospital blanket. It may sound funny to you. But I can really assure you, darling, I could see nothing funny about it at the time.”

  As Dr Kronin became more and more agitated and courageous, she had felt his hands trying to pull away her sheet, his lips kissing her neck and her cheeks; and in a panic she opened her eyes to see his face looking gigantic and distorted as it loomed close to hers. She swore to me that never in her life would she be able to forget the close-up of his black-rimmed bi-focals, through which his eyes were gleaming “like two dazzling little yellow pinpoints of lust.”

  Unable to tolerate the situation for one more second, she had suddenly given a violent jerking movement, and the force of her revulsion seemed to give her strength. Dr Kronin shot off the bed and landed with a crash on his back on the floor.

  The bed was very high, so he had a nasty fall. He just lay there for a moment as if he was stunned. Then slowly he sat up and fumbled for his spectacles, which had become dislodged and were lying in the corner with one lens cracked. He put them back on his nose and felt the base of his back, screwing up his face and making unhappy wincing expressions.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he complained in pathetic accusing tones. “I’ve always had trouble with my back and I think now you may have made me slip a disc.”

  Aunt Lavinia glared at him in silence as he sat there squatting on the floor, nursing his bruised spine. He looked so undignified and deflated that for a moment she almost felt some kind of unwilling pity for him. Nevertheless, she warned him that unless he got up and instantly left her room she was going to ring her bell and get some of the hospital attendants to have him removed.

  All her former fear of his authority had gone. He reminded her now of a dog which had just had its nose rubbed in its own mess. She could tell by the embarrassed and imploring expression in the eyes behind the semi-cracked bi-focals that Dr Kronin had sobered up and was now starting to feel terrified of her.

  “I’m afraid I’ve made rather a fool of myself,” he said.

  Aunt Lavinia considered this such an understatement that she could see no point in giving any reply.

  “Sometimes it can be hell being a man,” Dr Kronin muttered ruefully. He took out a handkerchief and wiped away the beads of perspiration that dotted his dome-like head.

  “Have you ever wished you were dead?” he asked her, apparently quite oblivious of the tactlessness of his question.

  “I know you think that I owe you an apology,” he added after a long silence.

  Aunt Lavinia was amazed that he seemed to regard her need for an apology as some kind of neurotic quirk. She asked him sarcastically if he always treated his female patients in the same way that he had treated her.

  “Very rarely,” Dr Kronin said.

  There was something so naive and outrageously frank about this statement that Aunt Lavinia had found it perversely appealing.

  “I saw you as special,” Dr Kronin said. “When I saw you lying there in the ward with your eyes all swollen from crying—you looked really special to me. I thought you looked so beautiful. And then I saw your bandages and something strange came over me ... I knew I was the only person in the world who under
stood you and could help you ...”

  He got up and limped over to the mirror that hung above the basin in her room. He adjusted his collar and tie, which had become rumpled and crooked in his fall. He smoothed the back strands of his sparse hair and he dusted his dapper suit. His voice was emotional when he spoke again.

  “I felt so protective towards you. Here is this beautiful woman, I thought to myself. Here is this beautiful creature and she feels cheated. All the men she has had in her life obviously have all let her down.”

  Dr Kronin stared mournfully at his own image in the mirror and once again tried to smooth the remnants of his hair.

  “I had the feeling that I was the man you had always been searching for, that if we could just be alone together for a little while I could release something inside you which no one had ever released before.”

  Aunt Lavinia said she wished I could have seen what Dr Kronin looked like while he was making this speech, that one really had to see the man with one’s own eyes before one could appreciate the grotesqueness of the idea that anyone could spend their life searching for him.

  Aunt Lavinia rolled her eyes. “The conceit of the little brute!” she said in awestruck tones.

  Dr Kronin had turned from the mirror and stared directly at her.

  “Well, it clearly didn’t work out like I hoped,” he said. “All I wanted to do was help you, and I failed. So what do I do now? I apologise.”

  He suddenly gave Aunt Lavinia a stiff little bow.

  “You will not be seeing me again,” he said. “Tomorrow I have to attend an important psychiatric conference in Manchester. I will see to it that you receive the best possible care while you remain in this hospital. I wish you all the luck in the world. I have to tell you that I feel extremely sorry for you.”

  Dr Kronin then came over to Aunt Lavinia’s bed. He lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips with all the reverence and gallantry of a courtier in a period play.

  “There’s just one last thing I want to say before I go. All my life I will never forget you.”

  Once again he gave Aunt Lavinia one of his courtly little bows.

  “Goodbye, unfortunate lady, goodbye,” he murmured portentously, and he picked up his black bag and walked out of the room.

  Aunt Lavinia finished painting her last fingernail and held out her hands in front of her, keeping her fingers stiffly separated, so that the wet varnish would not smudge.

  “In one sense he was rather a character, that Dr Kronin,” she said reflectively. “By no means an enjoyable character. By no means a figure that one would ever wish to have in charge of one in a hospital. But in his peculiar way the amazing thing is that I think he really viewed himself as a romantic. So that with his incomprehensible mentality one has to admit there was something quite individual about the little pig all the same ...”

  Aunt Lavinia blew impatiently on her wet nails.

  “I wonder why so many men love to think that all one’s other lovers have always cheated one and let one down. It’s such a very common masculine notion. The idea seems to tickle their vanity and it makes them feel powerful and potent or something. I’ve always found that whole concept the most footling rubbish. If I’ve ever had the feeling of being cheated, I’ve never felt it was the fault of men ...”

  Aunt Lavinia shook her fingers impatiently.

  “How boring nails are. I can’t think why one bothers with them. It’s like Chinese torture, waiting for them to dry. I’ve been talking a blue streak. You are certainly very kind the way you come round to listen to the blather of your silly old suicidal aunt. You are so young still. You are not quite out of the gawky listening stage. I feel guilty that I take advantage of you. I can still dazzle you with all my nonsense.”

  For a moment I wondered whether there had ever been such a figure as Dr Kronin, whether she had invented him or drastically improved him in order to shock and entertain me. The stories Aunt Lavinia told tended to be extremely vivid and somewhat surrealist, and she liked to tell them with great emphasis and well-planned timing. It was the zest and joy with which she told them that gave them their validity, and she made it hardly matter whether all the details were strictly true.

  “It’s heaven for me that you have come to visit me on my red-letter day, the first day of my deliverance.” Aunt Lavinia blew me a kiss from her bed. “Never having had a daughter of my own—it’s a delight for me to have someone younger to laugh with and confide in ...”

  Aunt Lavinia’s slanted brown quizzical eyes examined me appraisingly, as I sat sunk down in the squishy cushions of her comfortable chintz-covered armchair.

  “As you may have noticed, it’s also fun for me to have someone that I can boss around a bit,” she said. “I feel I have the right to be frank with you. I can tell you when your clothes really strike me as too deeply awful.”

  The sun was streaming through the impeccably polished panes of Aunt Lavinia’s large bay windows and creating brilliant pools of light on her white carpets. All at once she placed her hand across her eyes, and her newly varnished scarlet fingernails were like oval spots of blood against her pale forehead.

  “The sun looks very odd to me today,” she said. “It’s like meeting some old friend one went to school with and never quite expected—or in some way never hoped—to meet again.”

  Aunt Lavinia was a chain-smoker and she lit another Turkish cigarette, which she first placed in an amber holder. The sweetish, musky smell of her tobacco mingled with the powerful, haunting smell of her beautiful lilies.

  “To get back to you,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I thought about you a lot when I was lying there in the hospital—that is, of course, when the peccadillos of my psychiatrist and my other various vicissitudes were not preoccupying my mind. I don’t know why, but I found myself feeling very alarmed for you.”

  She pointed to her windows.

  “Please, darling. Could you please pull a bit of curtain. The sun is wonderful, of course. But somehow I can’t face quite so much gorgeous sun right now.”

  I got up and pulled her curtains, and she thanked me.

  “You are an angel,” she said. “I am lucky to have a niece who bothers to bother with her capricious old aunt at all.”

  She smoked silently for a moment, drawing the Turkish smoke into her lungs and then blowing it out in deliberately careful rings.

  “I don’t quite know why I felt such a curious anxiety for you when I was in hospital. I imagine it was just my debilitated state, combined with auntish foolishness. That’s poor Poo Poo scratching on my door, darling. Could you be a saint and let the little fellow in?”

  I let Poo Poo in, and Aunt Lavinia greeted him with rapturous enthusiasm. He was pleased by her excitement and rolled and wriggled on her white silk coverlet, while she patted and praised him and told him that for her he would always be the dog of all dogs.

  “To get back to why I felt such anxiety for you while I was in hospital ...” Aunt Lavinia had just pacified Poo Poo by resting him on her lap and allowing him to chew on a rubber bone. “I kept wondering if it was quite normal the way you often just sit there so quietly being an excellent listener, looking very serious and charming and all that, but not contributing very much at all.”

  She got up from the bed, and there was something uncharacteristically brusque and almost irritable in her movements. She said she was going to find her dog some charcoal biscuits, and she rummaged in a drawer. Then she flopped down again in a relaxed position on her bed, feeding Poo Poo the black crumbly squares, and it surprised me that someone who was in many ways so very fastidious seemed not to care that the blackened saliva from Poo Poo’s jaws was dribbling down and making dark stains on her white and spotless bed cover.

  “Thinking about you,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I felt you still have much too much youthful over-intensity. I think you should try to lose some of that. I also feel that in general you should try to be more socially at ease and expansive. Shyness is all right. But only to a point, and y
ours can sometimes seem quite oppressive.”

  Aunt Lavinia threw me another kiss.

  “I adore you. You are at ease with me because you know me very well and I can make you laugh and draw you out of your shell. But I’ve sometimes seen you with other people and you haven’t opened your mouth the entire evening. You’ve given the appearance of being just about as vivacious, interesting and delightful to meet as our mutual relation in Hove—that sainted old sourpuss Mrs Webster ...”

  Aunt Lavinia saw my look of horror, and she held out both her arms to me in an affectionate gesture as if she wanted to hug me.

  “I’m exaggerating,” she said. “Don’t take me literally. I find that one often has to exaggerate in order to make one’s point. I don’t think that anyone has ever felt that you in any way resemble old Granny Webster. But I still think you should remember her example and let it be a caution to you ...”

  Aunt Lavinia peeled off her nylon stockings and said she couldn’t decide whether it was worth the effort to varnish her toenails.

  “I feel a need to do something while I’m delivering lectures. If I was a lady of the ancien régime I would be scolding you and also doing my petit point.”

  She decided not to paint her toenails—that no one would care if she painted them anyway. She said she was only going to lecture me for a few more minutes and then she would try and think of something that would be fun for us both to do.

  “No one has ever thought you were like old Mrs Webster,” Aunt Lavinia said. “But I’m afraid, darling, they have found you rather odd in the way you sit there at parties looking so goggle-eyed and tongue-tied. When you are with strangers you are so withdrawn that everyone finds your presence rather alarming. You just sit there staring at everyone in that intense, tormented way. You really must try to stop doing that, because it makes people nervous. They wonder whether you’ve got something gravely wrong with you. They wonder whether you are quite all right in the head.”