Great Granny Webster

by Caroline Blackwood

  I looked down at the sleeves of my school jacket, and I saw that there was quite a large expanse of wrist showing between my sleeve and my hand.

  “I don’t blame you personally for this,” Great Granny Webster added. “I entirely blame your mother. A growing girl outgrows things. I know that your mother is a war widow, but I still have to say that I find it quite unforgivable that she should have sent you to stay with me attired like this. There is really nothing more unattractive than the sight of a young woman displaying a repulsive amount of arm. I am not going to mention this subject again.”

  Great Granny Webster always told the truth. She never once referred either to my sleeves or to my arms again.

  At the beginning of my stay with her I saw her as little more than a depressing and formal ancient who was much too old for it to be possible for anyone to judge her by human standards. She was identical with all the rickety near-the-grave lady relations dressed in mourning who sometimes appeared in the houses of my school-friends. At that point all I knew about this woman and her effect was that already I was starting to count the minutes of the months that had to pass before I could escape from under her roof.

  Although technically Great Granny Webster could provide sea air, because her house was in Hove, a suburb of Brighton, not a whiff of it ever seemed to be able to penetrate the musty interior with its sealed and heavily curtained Victorian windows. Living in her large cold villa I often felt that I was light-years away from the world I craved and she abominated: the world of the crowded Brighton beach, where children dug moats for sand-castles with elaborate turrets that had been cast out of painted tin pails, where what Great Granny Webster always referred to with a shiver as “trippers” lay, their over-white city bodies under a cold weak sun as they tried to get brown, or ate candy-floss and toffee-apples as they walked along the pier, on which there were Penny Arcades, Punch and Judy shows, Salvation Army bands and postcards of fat ladies in bathing suits.

  I never once managed to get down to the Brighton beach in the two months I lived with Great Granny Webster. I could easily have gone without her, but she made me feel that as her guest it was my duty never to leave her side—as if I was her paid companion. The fact that there might be differences between us, not merely in age but also in taste, never troubled her. When she planned our days she planned that we should both do whatever she felt like doing, together.

  Soon after I first arrived to stay with her and got to know her sedentary and rigidly unbending ways, I realised that it would be utterly disastrous to try to persuade her to go down to the Brighton beach. I don’t think that she had even driven through the streets of Brighton for years—she saw the town as such a loathsome sink of modernism, vulgarity and vice, the total antithesis of the staid and wealthy gentility of Hove. The idea of trying to coax this grim and fiercely joyless old lady down to the windy Brighton beach, where she might easily have a heart attack just from the horror and the shock of being forced to step over the close-packed, half-naked bodies of “trippers,” was only too obviously inconceivable.

  The Brighton beach was to remain for me like a gay and tempting paradise that was tantalisingly near and yet utterly impossible to reach. I never stopped thinking about it when she forced me to do the thing I found the dullest, the most disagreeable of all, in those unforgettably long and unamusing days I spent in her company—when she made me take drives with her in the afternoons.

  Great Granny Webster knew that I was meant to need sea air, and this suited her very well because apparently she needed it herself. At four o’clock every afternoon a hired Rolls-Royce from a Hove car firm appeared at her door with a uniformed, unctuous chauffeur, who would then drive both of us, as if he was driving two royalties, at a slow creep along the bleak misty sea-front of Hove. To and fro, to and fro, we would drive for exactly an hour while one of the windows of the Rolls-Royce was wound down just enough to let in a very small sniff of salt and seaweed-smelling air.

  There was something memorably awful about those pointless and monotonous afternoon drives in the vast, soft-wheeled, swaying black car with the silver emblem of a dashing sea-horse on its bonnet. In that car I felt that I was much too near to Great Granny Webster. Sealed off behind the glass partition that separated us from the driver, I felt that I could actually smell the acid scent of her old age—smell the sourness of her displeasure with everything, past, present and future.

  I don’t think that I have ever since met a human being who smiled more rarely, who found less in life to amuse her. She took a pride in her own lack of humour, as if she saw it as an upper-class Scottish virtue. If humour can sometimes be used as a defence against the whip-lash cuts of pain, failure, despair and loss, by reducing such things to absurdity, Great Granny Webster scorned to use any such shield, seeing it as a defence only suitable for “trippers.”

  “Life is no joke,” she once said to me. “Life can never be much of a joke for the thinking person.”

  When one was with her she could almost persuade one that there was something cowardly and despicable in any emotional dodging, in any refusal to experience every single blow that life could deal one, head-on. She could make one feel that there was an almost superhuman courage in the way she was not frightened to admit that the only thing she now hoped for from life was a continued consciousness, unpleasant as she well knew that it had to be. All she wanted from each new day that broke was the knowledge that she was still defiantly there—that against all odds she had still managed to survive in the lonely, loveless vacuum she had created for herself.

  “I have nothing to live for any more,” she would murmur. I was always astonished by the way her tone sounded so smug and boastful. I found it impossible to understand how she could take such defiant pride in the fact that she had managed to keep existing in her disagreeable, large, cold villa in Hove without the slightest intellectual or emotional motivation, like a piece of dried-up antique brown moss that can mysteriously survive without water, simply by clinging to the hard cold surface of a rock.

  Sometimes, cruising along with her in the Rolls-Royce, I felt I might suffocate just from being so enclosed with her. Although with her frugality she was happy to allow her house to be as chill as a morgue, she had a perverse terror of draughts and the tiny chink of air that was all she would allow into the car was never enough. I used to feel that she had sealed me off from the world forever. We were both like figures in a glass case in some museum separated from everything that was alive by the closed windows and the glass of the Rolls-Royce’s partition. Inside that car there was nothing to breathe except her silent and stoical despondency.

  “Very disappointing weather,” Great Granny Webster would say finally to the chauffeur, having been driven for an hour totally silent, and very upright, with the usual pained expression on her long lugubrious face and her knees tightly wrapped in a tartan rug.

  “Very disappointing, Mrs Webster. It started nice this morning—but now I’m afraid it seems to be clouding over.”

  “Well, I think that will really be quite enough for one day. Could you please now drive us home.”

  After the glare on the sea-front her house never appeared darker than when we got back from our afternoon drives. It seemed like a great gloomy, mysterious shrine that had been piously erected to commemorate something even more gloomy and mysterious than itself. It was as if every object that it contained had been chosen merely because it was heavy, expensive and sombre. Great Granny Webster seemed to hate colours. Almost everything she owned was either black or dark brown.

  “You can read now,” she would say, pointing to a chair as we came into her icy, ill-lit drawing-room. “Dinner will not be served until seven.” And the rest of the evening would stretch in front of me as dark as her furniture, like a pitch-black tunnel that would never end.

  Great Granny Webster always liked to see me read while she sat hour after hour doing nothing in her drawing-room.

  “I’m glad to see a young person who still e
njoys reading good books,” she would say. “Nowadays no one seems to want to read anything worthwhile any more.”

  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.