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.
My grandmother had developed an obsessional interest in what she called “the little people.” When she first claimed she could see them, her family thought she was joking. They imagined that, as an Englishwoman who had taken up residence in Northern Ireland, she must in some silly, whimsical way, be trying to adapt herself to Irish superstitions.
Soon it became clear that her belief in the forces of the supernatural had become a genuine fixation, for she tried to convert everyone to her beliefs and became snarling and hostile if she felt her audience was patronising her. She claimed that she could understand the language of the fairies, that they were continually sending her messages, that it was important only to listen to the instructions of the good ones for they could help you avert the terrible spells that might be put on you by demons. Tommy Redcliffe found her intolerably exhaustin
g and boring when she went on talking like this.
When my grandmother spent most of the day shut up in her bedroom, she sat cross-legged on the floor and cut out coloured pictures of elves and fairies from her enormous collection of children’s books. What everyone found blood-curdling was that she herself had started to look very like the model fairies that you see on the top of Christmas trees. She had the same frozen blank expression, the agelessness that made her seem neither child nor woman. Her face was china white, and her curls were still very blonde and arranged in a way that made her appear to be wearing a golden wig. When she entered a room she never walked, she always flitted. Often she kept a fixed smile on her face, and when she talked through this smile in a tense and impassioned manner about spells and curses, potions and magic, it was as if she were incapable of relaxing it because it had been painted on her face in order to radiate her own inner notion of fairy-like goodwill.
My grandmother’s eyes had unnerved Tommy Redcliffe. He had found them much too bright and artificial, and they had given him the disquieting impression that the poor woman had lost her real ones and had had them replaced by two rounds of glass.
My grandmother liked to wear white diaphanous dresses and she covered her shoulders with a silver-lace shawl. As she darted noiselessly round Dunmartin Hall in her curiously rapid and tiptoe manner, the ends of her silvery shawl would stream out behind her, almost as though she had grown fairy wings. Even in winter she went about barefoot. This always astonished any visitors who came to the house, for they found it impossible to understand why she was so unperturbed by the perishing cold.
I asked Tommy Redcliffe how my father used to behave with his eccentric mother. Apparently he always became very white and withdrawn whenever she came into the room but brightened the moment she left it. Whenever my grandmother was present he would pick up a book and become so immersed in the text that he appeared to be trying to get to the other side of its print so that the words could shield him like a barbed-wire fence. He never wanted to discuss my grandmother with his friend, but regarded her condition much as he regarded the state of his father’s house, accepting it as a distressing fact which, insofar as was possible, he hoped could be ignored.
My father went over to Northern Ireland only at Christmas and Easter and for one month in the summer. Tommy Redcliffe was convinced that he dreaded his visits and only made them for the sake of my grandfather Dunmartin, for whom he felt both pity and affection.
Aunt Lavinia was apparently much more ruthless. She was adamant in her refusal to visit her parents in their Ulster home. The impecunious and uncomfortable grandeur in which this unhappy and embattled couple lived not only depressed her but struck her as ludicrous. She loved comfort, luxury and amusement. In Ulster there were no night-clubs; there was no theatre; there were very few parties given there that Aunt Lavinia considered entertaining. To her, Northern Ireland was a deadly and provincial No Man’s Land, and the secluded and supposedly aristocratic demesne of Dunmartin Hall existed for her as one of its most unappealing features. The beautiful woods of Dunmartin that my grandmother had managed to people with the magical spirits of her hectic imagination were damp monotonous tracts of trees to the pleasure-loving Aunt Lavinia. They were a place where you could take a dull walk in the rain because no one offered you anything better to do. She dreaded being asked to sit up half the night with my anxious grandfather while he showed her all the accounts and the books of his farm and his estate. Aunt Lavinia had no gift for mathematics, and she suspected that his grasp of the figures he liked to show her was almost as weak as her own. All she ever gathered was that the Dunmartin accounts were disastrous. To her, money was an abstraction. If you were gay and well-dressed, it was something that arrived from admiring men. She could see no magical way of making it arrive to salvage my grandfather’s rocky and gorse-infested acres. Aunt Lavinia stubbornly kept away from Northern Ireland, because condoling with my grandfather on the horror of his financial accounts and being under the same leaking roof as my unhinged fairy-loving grandmother was not an experience she could see as “fun.”
According to Tommy Redcliffe my father liked to spend a lot of time in the woods when he visited Dunmartin Hall. Taking a gun as a pretext that he was shooting, he would wander round them most of the day. Even when the rain was torrential he liked to keep out of the house. In the evenings he would take his Oxford friend up to a tiny little room in one of the attics, where he had put a couple of armchairs and a bamboo table. In this room, in which his mother was most unlikely to make one of her swooping fairy-magic appearances, he would get out a bottle of brandy and relax, and they would talk about books and politics most of the night.
Sometimes my grandfather would stop reading through the accounts of his estate and creep up to the attic to join the two young men. He too would relax while he drank with them, and the worry lines would look less darkly pencilled on his tense face. Up in that attic Tommy Redcliffe got the feeling he was being drawn into some kind of peculiar conspiracy. He felt that they were all in some tree-house where the children could hide from the adults. Three men were forming a charmed circle to shut out a force that threatened them. At the time the warm and distorting effects of brandy could make these evenings seem agreeable and normal. Only in the mornings would it strike him that there had been something sad and eccentric in the way they had spent so many hours of the night crouched hiding in the dusty little attic of such a palatial house.
Tommy Redcliffe would never have gone to stay at Dunmartin Hall if he had not felt that it was important for him as a friend to go there to give a little support to my father. He always found the atmosphere of the house intensely melancholy. He had also disliked the unpleasant feeling of uncertainty that was created by my grandmother’s frequent disappearances. My grandfather would discover that his wife was missing from her room, and having searched the house from roof to cellar he would then set off with a gamekeeper to search the woods and the lake. My father always offered to help try to find his mother, but Grandfather Dunmartin insisted it would be better if he didn’t come.
Tommy Redcliffe had found it very distressing to watch this florid-faced man in his tweed jacket and jodhpurs wading through the dung-coloured puddles of his derelict farmyards as he set off to look for his wife, wearing an expression that was as mournful as that of the spaniels that followed at his heels.
My grandmother was considered to have “good” days and “bad” days. And she always disappeared on so-called bad days. It was often many hours before my grandfather found her. He would go through agonies of indecision as he tried to make up his mind whether or not to call in the local police. He was very unanxious to create any scandal that would give his house a bad reputation in the surrounding countryside. He had a horror that my grandmother’s name, which he saw as something sacred, might appear in the Belfast papers. He made arbitrary decisions that he would get in the police and their search-dogs if his wife was not found by ten, by eleven, by midnight ... Somehow he always managed to find her in very unlikely places. There was a little bramble-covered island in the middle of the lake; and there she would be, having rowed herself out in the fishing-boat. She would be sitting on a rock on its shore, dangling her bleeding bare feet in the icy slate-grey water. At other times she would be hiding in the thicket of a yew-tree or crouching inside the trunk of a hollow oak. She was usually in a very over-agitated state of mind when she was discovered. She was either elated, jabbering exalted nonsense and saying the fairies had chosen her as their queen, or petrified, rolling her eyes in a pitiful fashion and moaning that she was in the grip of some evil spell. It was often very difficult to persuade her to come back to the house. My grandfather was unfailingly patient. Once he found his wife, he would send the gamekeeper away. Standing with a torch in the woods, he would plead with her gently; he would coax and cajole. In winter the rain was often so heavy that they were soaked to the skin in minutes; but grandfather would ignore it, totally concentrated on trying to s
ay the right thing to calm her. Finally he would succeed—maybe because she knew that in his fussy, anxious fashion he was now the only person who still loved her.
Tommy Redcliffe and my father, semi-tipsy on brandy and pink-eyed from cigar smoke, would stay up in their attic, occasionally taking nervous peeps from its tiny window, hoping for the sight of the flash-light, which would mean that my grandmother, soaked and usually weeping, was at last being brought safely home.
Cousin Kathleen had always claimed that my grandmother was a woman who had never wanted to have children, that she had had them only because the conventions of the time demanded that she produce heirs for her husband. It was after the birth of Aunt Lavinia that she first showed signs of severe mental illness and started behaving as if she were bewitched. She developed a crazy obsession that both my aunt and my father were changelings. She kept screaming that her real children had been stolen by evil fairies and replaced by demon substitutes. She wept and moaned for the ones she had lost. When she saw my father and Aunt Lavinia, she glared at them with a spitting malevolence and terror.
My grandfather called in a specialist from Belfast, who gave her many pills, which had no effect on her behaviour. The doctor advised that her children should immediately be got out of the house. If she could forget their very existence, he hoped that her nervous illness might subside. Not having any idea where he could send them, Grandfather Dunmartin had quickly moved my father and Aunt Lavinia, who were then very small, to a wing which was the furthest removed from my grandmother’s bedroom. There, for a while, they were looked after by two Northern Irish girls who were told not to allow them to make any noise. For whenever my grandmother heard them laughing or crying, it set her off into a fit of convulsive weeping as she mourned the children who had been taken from her.
Great Granny Webster Page 9