“I’m very glad that she can’t see any of this,” I found myself thinking. Surely she would have been horrified by the recklessness by which her remains gave the impression of being airily squandered. She, who had always liked to hoard and count and ration, could surely only be appalled by the lavish and devil-may-care generosity with which she was now being poured into the earth as if the contents of her urn could never come to an end.
I glanced sideways at Richards, guessing that she too must be feeling that there was something shockingly unsuitable in the ruthless way that death had taken from her old employer everything that was sombre and careful.
At the very moment I looked at her, a particularly fierce blast of wind from the sea came hurtling through the graveyard. It caught the jet of ashes which were still gushing out of the urn. It lifted up the remains and sent them dancing around in the air.
I looked down at my black funeral clothes and I saw with a feeling of chill and terror that they were coated with white flecks as if I had just been in a snow storm. I found the sight of them utterly sickening, but I made no attempt to brush them off in case Richards might see me doing it and take it as a sign of disrespect.
I glanced once again at my great-grandmother’s aged maid, for I was still curious as to her reaction to the ceremony. I saw that her eye which was free from the black patch was squeezed tightly shut. I was never to know whether Richards was deliberately trying to blot out the horrifying sight of the sugary and wind-blown incorrectness with which Great Granny Webster was now dancing drunkenly over the earth, or whether she was only flinching because by a final misfortune some last feathery fleck of the woman for whom she had worked so hard and so long had got lodged in her one good eye.
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1977 by Caroline Lowell
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Honor Moore
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Cover photograph: Arthur Batut, Fifty Inhabitants of Labruguiere, France, and Their Composite Portrait Type (detail); Espace Photographique Arthur Batut, 81290 Labruguiere, France
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Blackwood, Caroline.
Great Granny Webster / Caroline Blackwood ; introduction by Honor Moore.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 1-59017-007-5 (alk. paper)
1. Aristocracy (Social class)—Fiction. 2. Grandparent and child—Fiction. 3. Hove (England)—Fiction. 4. Teenage girls—Fiction. 5. Grandmothers—Fiction. 6. Aged women—Fiction. I. Title. II.Series.
PR6052.L3423 G74 2002
823'.914—dc21
2002002880
eISBN 978-1-59017-539-2
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Great Granny Webster Page 12