“Surely she can’t last long,” I thought, and just for a moment I felt a little bit sorry for her. She seemed to have a pathos, standing on the platform in her widow’s weeds with her spine as straight as the back of the chair on which she continually trained it. Younger people were slouching past her, dragging suitcases and pushing her aside. She glared at them with her usual fierce and anguished disapproval; but in the busy bustle of the station neither her disapproval nor the superiority of her impeccable posture seemed to intimidate anyone. Outside the setting of her house her very strengths seemed to turn into frailties, and there appeared to be only futility in her obstinate determination to preserve an old-world lady-like stance when it had no current usefulness.
“I miss your father,” she said.
I found it strange that she mentioned him only at the last moment. I wondered why she had never spoken more about him before.
“He was so kind to me,” she said. “Before he was killed he was really very kind to me. Whenever he got leave from the army he never forgot me. The trains were really quite dreadful in the war, but he would always come struggling down to Hove in the black-out—just to see a dull old woman. He always came in his khaki uniform. It shocked me to see him as a soldier—I never thought it suited him. Then it shocked me to hear he had been shot. It seemed a waste. He was still only a child. What a very good brain he had. He did so well at Oxford. I was sorry to hear he had been lost.”
“Goodbye,” I said.
The train whistle was blowing. For a moment I felt a twinge of panic that I had to leave her. After eight weeks I had become so accustomed to living in her static and unchallenging old-person’s world that it frightened me to realise that now I had to return to a life where more would be asked of me than that I simply “keep myself to myself.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “I do hope you remembered to tip Richards. Tips mean so much to servants.”
2
SEVERAL years later I asked my Aunt Lavinia why she thought her brother had been so attached to Great Granny Webster. I was baffled trying to understand why a soldier in his early thirties, a man who had apparently liked talking and drinking and wild London parties, had chosen to spend the precious days of his army leave trailing down to Hove in the black-out to sip water and listen to the unenlivening conversation of Great Granny Webster.
Aunt Lavinia was then thirty-two and she was always described as a “jolie laide.” A play-girl in the style of the ’twenties, she was famous for her beautiful legs and for the fact that she had been married briefly to three millionaires while taking at the same time a large selection of lovers, who were not only friends of her husbands’ but almost as wellendowed financially. Her attitude to life appeared so resolutely frivolous that perversely she could seem to have the seriousness of someone with a sense of driving inner purpose. She believed in having “fun” as if it was a state of grace. Taking nothing seriously except amusement, she caused very little rancour, and although she was considered untrustworthy and wild and was reputed once to have gate-crashed a fashionable London party totally naked except for a sanitary towel, she managed to slip in and out of her many relationships, which she invariably described as “divine,” like an elegant and expensive eel.
She had the gift of remaining on friendly terms with all the men she had abandoned, and she spent her mornings chatting and laughing with them on the telephone. She was able to give them all the feeling that if she got so much pleasure from having fun there would be something niggardly if they did not do their best to see that she continued to have it. Although she had never had any children—“Who could face that, darling?”—all her ex-husbands and ex-lovers continued to finance her for years after she had left them, though they were under no legal obligation to do so. Having no money of her own, yet loving to entertain on a recklessly generous scale, she was continually on the verge of going “broke”; but she was always saved by the men from her past, who would rally to her rescue and send her large lump-sum donations, as though she had somehow convinced them that supporting the extravagance of the life she loved to live was like contributing to a worthwhile charity.
When the war started Aunt Lavinia astonished her friends and family by joining the A.T.S. and rising very quickly to the rank of Captain. “Everyone thought that I was so irresponsible and dotty that I would be court-martialled immediately. But they couldn’t have been more wrong, darling ...”
She said that having always seen herself as a leader of men she found that all she needed to do for the “duration of hostilities” was reverse her usual role and become a leader of women. “The joke was this ... In the end, I was the one who was expected to do all the court-martialling.”
She claimed that she had adored the war—that it couldn’t have been more fun, that it was rubbish to think that khaki army uniforms had to make women look dowdy. “Nothing can be more chic and sexy if you know how to wear them right. You just have to be a bit fussy to see they have a really perfect fit round the waist. Then all you have to do is put them on with a certain belief and dash—and you are away.”
She once told me that the little platoon of women who were under her wartime command had had statistically by far the highest pregnancy rate of all the women who joined the services in the British Isles. “It was all too ghastly and shaming, darling ... I’m speaking from the point of view of a Captain. We were stationed in this nightmare camp—stuck away in some dreadful rainy mountains in Wales. There was an R.A.F. station right near by and that was fatal ... We had a huge corrugated-iron barn on our premises and I knew that my girls were all in there most of the night just screwing away. Well, I was the one who was meant to go into that barn with a flash-light torch to enforce military discipline. Can you imagine anything worse? Can you blame me for not being able to face it? I didn’t want to stir up a terrifying hornet’s nest of furious R.A.F. men in their under-pants ...”
One day Aunt Lavinia rang me up to say that it was too maddening, she was in prison. When I sounded astonished she admitted that it wasn’t exactly a prison, but it was just as bad, for she was being detained in a hospital where she had been put by the police. She then explained that she had tried to commit suicide two days before—that it had been “infuriating,” for the whole thing had failed. “I had it all perfectly planned, darling. It couldn’t have been more Roman ... I was in my bath with my bottle of whisky for courage, and my gleaming razor. It all went like a dream. It didn’t even hurt. And then I suddenly noticed that all my bath water had turned some quite amazing hue of scarlet. It made me feel completely sick. There’s something unexpectedly ghastly about finding oneself in a bath full of gore and melting soap. Anyway, after that, I somehow don’t remember any more ... But the real nightmare is that now I’ve ended up confined in this dreadful place like a convict. All the nurses are the most horrible old bitches. The doctor here says that I must have fainted. It’s all too disgusting—if you faint, apparently all the blood in your veins automatically congeals. How on earth was one meant to know that fainting could be so fatal?”
This soliloquy, which Aunt Lavinia delivered in exactly the same breathlessly mannered and laughing way that she told amusing anecdotes at her cocktail parties, I found horrifying. She kept repeating that it was “infuriating” that she had failed in her attempt, but she gave me no feeling that she was asking for any sympathy for the ugly and despairing state of mind that must have preceded her decision to take her life. She merely appeared to be demanding the social sympathy one might extend to someone who had been planning a much-longed-for trip to the Greek Islands, only to be thwarted by some tiresome technicality which had necessitated that the holiday be cancelled.
Obviously she wanted to present her near-suicide as farce rather than tragedy. She appeared to see death rather as she saw life, as an exciting but unimportant game. She seemed untouched by her recent experience. Just as Great Granny Webster always behaved as if she felt it would be demeaning and unladylike to be pleased by anything,
so Aunt Lavinia always behaved as if there was something degrading in admitting to any feelings of distress. On the telephone she kept assuring me that she had never felt better in her life—there was only one thing that was upsetting and angering her: the hospital had confiscated her brush and her comb.
“They won’t allow me any objects. They don’t trust me. It’s all too stupid. I’d really love someone to tell me how one would begin to commit suicide with a comb. Would one eat it? But I feel in despair, darling. I can’t tell you the fright I look ...”
I asked her if she would like me to visit her, but she said she couldn’t bear me to see her looking such a dishevelled mess.
“If they want to drive a person like me to her death they couldn’t be setting about it more successfully. How can one be expected to regain one’s wish to live when the brutes make it impossible for one to have a lipstick or do one’s hair?”
I went round to see her in her Mayfair house the same morning that she was released from hospital.
Her house combined ostentatiousness and vulgarity with every kind of comfort. In its centre was a small ballroom with a polished parquet floor and a raised dais for the band. This was where she gave her parties. In her drawing-room there was a huge gleaming chromium-plated bar. All the shelves behind it were stacked with rows and rows of bottles of rare wine, a vast amount of spirits and various exotic liqueurs. She had managed to make this great display of alcohol seem like a splendid and memorable decoration. Her bar, with its rich contrasting colours, dominated the room like an impressive, jewel-studded altar.
Aunt Lavinia loved to sit in front of her bar on a high chromium stool with a seat made of green velvet. She would cross her legs and pull up her skirts to show their beauty and stay there late into the night, laughing with friends, to whom she dispensed drinks with the efficiency of an able, talkative bar-maid.
Most of the floors in her house had been laid with white wall-to-wall carpeting, so thick and bouncy it gave you the sense of being on a trampoline. One felt uneasy walking on so much whiteness. Her carpets created a fear that one might soil them with a footprint, as though one were walking through some large expanse of virgin snow.
Aunt Lavinia’s walls were covered with a mixture of elaborate mirrors and fashionable portraits in oil. All the portraits were of herself, and they mostly represented her wearing period costume. On her piano, on every tiny mock-Regency card-table, were cluttered photographs of Aunt Lavinia, of her poodle Poo Poo, of her various lost husbands and lovers. It was as if she needed a great deal of visual evidence to be able to feel that any of these posed figures had much validity.
When I went up to her bedroom on the day she came out of hospital I dreaded opening the door, for I had a horror of finding her beautiful white carpets trailed with spots of blood. I was haunted by an image of Aunt Lavinia lying in scarlet water in her luxurious bathroom, which she had fitted out with white enamelled tiles adorned with golden dragons—that bathroom which had more glass shelves than I had ever seen, covered with her collection of glass fishes containing pine and wild-rose and lily-of-the-valley bath essence.
If there had been any traces of her recent gruesome incident, she had completely eradicated them with the same ease and speed with which she seemed to be able to blot out all unpleasant experience. There she was, looking very young. Her bedroom was filled with great vases of wonderful scented white lilies, which she had already found the time to send to herself from some local florist.
As usual, she was immaculately dressed with what she always called “flair.” She was wearing all the gay little kerchiefs, the gleaming unexpected buttons, the subtly placed flash of valuable jewellery, by which she managed to make the drabbest clothes she wore seem unique, and amazing. Her oddly-shaped face, which generally looked beautiful, and only sometimes reminded one too much of an over-intense and bright-eyed monkey, had been very carefully made up. Clearly she had left “prison” and gone immediately to an early-morning appointment with her hairdresser.
She said she felt in “excellent form.” She seemed just as she had always seemed to me—affectionate, flippant and disquietingly unreal. She appeared to be very relaxed, chatting about this and that in confidential and husky tones. She told me that she was dying to go racing at Newmarket this year—that she had been before and always found it divine. She felt no need to give me any reasons why she had just tried to kill herself. All her relationships had invariably been superficial, and maybe she felt so superficially rooted to life that it seemed hardly very momentous to her whether she stayed in it or left it. She gave me the sense that she felt it would only bore me if she went into explanations—that she thought she would be stating the obvious. She had a horror of being dull.
Aunt Lavinia had always told me that I was by far her favourite relation. I discovered later that she had told my brother exactly the same thing. Her flattery wasn’t entirely self-indulgent, it stemmed from such a strong desire to make everyone’s dealings with her uniquely pleasant. Whatever she really felt about me, she liked to ring me up from time to time to tell me about her latest “adventure.” This might be a new love affair, a discovery of some new way of making raspberry ice-cream or some unlikely vicissitude that had befallen her while she was taking Poo Poo to the vet.
Now it was only the “adventurous” side of her bungled suicide that she wished to discuss with me, the horrors of her treatment in the hospital.
“At the time I never told you the worst thing that happened to me, darling. Certain experiences can be so distasteful that one can only bear to discuss them later when they have been to some degree digested ...”
Dr Kronin, the head psychiatrist, had become infatuated with her. “To understand, darling, why I found this so insufferable you have to picture my unenviable predicament—my frame of mind. You have to visualise me chained to my narrow bed. A prisoner of the state. A person regarded by all and sundry as a non-person. A creature considered to be of unsound mind. All my most basic human rights denied ...”
Aunt Lavinia went over to her dressing-table, which was kidney-shaped and had skirts of mushroom velvet fringed with bobbles. Sitting down on a swivel stool, she picked up one of the silver-backed hairbrushes from Cartiers which had recently been given her by an admirer and on which her initials were engraved in large baroque letters. As she talked, she kept running the brush through her silky auburn hair, with a deliberate self-indulgent relish. Then, selecting a lipstick in a silver case that exactly matched the hairbrush, she examined herself with approval and carefully perfected the scarlet cupid’s bow line of her lips.
“It was absolutely typical,” she said. “Just when I was writhing in the abyss, a wreck of a woman with no make-up and dirty clotted hospital hair, that most hated figure of all, my chief jailer, the head psychiatrist, developed the most unwelcome and fatal crush on me. I really had quite a ghastly time with him, darling. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. Incarcerated in that red-brick Victorian monstrosity of a hospital, I was hardly in the mood for love ...”
Aunt Lavinia got up from her dressing-table and glided across her bedroom, her slim hips swaying in the provocative way she walked because she always wore such excessively high-heeled shoes. She found an ivory manicure set in one of her cupboards and came back to lie down and stretch herself comfortably on her large Hollywood bed with the gleaming white satin cover that exactly matched her carpets and looked both festive and bridal. She threw off her shoes, and I noticed how beautiful her feet were. As she went on talking, she started to give herself a manicure and took a piece of cotton wool dipped in pear-smelling varnish-remover and deftly began removing the scarlet enamel from her long and perfect nails.
She said that when she had first been admitted to the hospital she had been put in the public ward. Dr Kronin, the chief psychiatrist, had come to see her, and stood by her bed looking through sheaves of notes. She had been in a dazed state, having just finished a crying spell. She had vaguely noticed that he was
physically extremely unprepossessing, that he had a balding and sallow dome of a head, and moist selfish-looking lips, and that he was wearing thick bi-focal lenses through which gleamed a pair of sulphur-coloured eyes that resembled two tiny sultanas.
She felt not the slightest wish to talk to him. He struck her as one of those dapper little ugly doctors who carry unnecessarily large black bags and bristle with self-importance and insensitivity.
“How do you like it here?” he asked her.
She thought the question idiotic but made some grunting answer.
Dr Kronin said he had the feeling that she would make a quicker recovery if she was moved to a private room.
“I felt quite grateful to the wretched little man.” Aunt Lavinia started putting fresh scarlet varnish on one of her fingernails, taking care to leave a white and even moon. “I really felt quite grateful. That is the irony.”
She had been extremely anxious to move, because she felt a desperate need to have a private telephone. “You know me, darling. If you cut me off from a telephone, it’s like cutting me off from oxygen.”
Dr Kronin had asked her if she could afford to be a private patient. She found this insulting and impertinent. “I’ve never enjoyed being regarded as a pauper, particularly on the occasions when I am perilously near to being one. So, despite my weakened condition, I stared at Dr Kronin with what I hoped was a quelling and haughty gaze, and I assured him that money was no object. And all the time I was frantically wondering which of my beaux I dared ask to fork out and cover my expenses ...”
Dr Kronin had said he would arrange for her to be moved as soon as possible.
“It still never occurred to me that he had the diabolical plan of using my private room as if it was his private brothel ...”
Apart from her need for a telephone, Aunt Lavinia had been very keen to get out of the public ward. “It could hardly be described as paradise. I was wedged between an old woman who was suffering from senile dementia and not at all attractive, with her toothless gums and her non-stop threats and mutterings, and an Armenian alcoholic who was exhibiting severe withdrawal symptoms which made her howl all night like a wolf ...”
Great Granny Webster Page 4
