Great Granny Webster

by Caroline Blackwood

  She wrote to my grandfather saying that she was coming up to London and wished to see her daughter’s doctors. She travelled up on the Brighton train, dressed in her usual black. She arrived at my grandfather’s rented house in Chelsea. Her eyes were two exhausted pools of annoyance. She behaved as if she felt it was outrageous that she had been put to so much inconvenience, but she kept her mouth stoically compressed and her whole bearing was unflaggingly brave. She refused to see her daughter, who was upstairs in a bedroom guarded by two male nurses, as usual cutting out pictures of witches and wizards from a children’s fairy book.

  Great Granny Webster spoke briefly with her daughter’s doctors. She made up her mind what should be done, with-out consulting my grandfather. She treated him with silent disgust, as if she saw him as a silly little boy and held him personally responsible for a situation she found sickening—one that long ago should have been correctly dealt with. She signed all the papers that were necessary to commit her daughter for life to a mental institution. Leaving my grandfather in a fit of helpless weeping, she sailed off with her usual silent hauteur and took the next train back to Hove.

  “Old Mrs Webster was never a very pleasant woman ...” Tommy Redcliffe said to me. “Yet I think that for your father she represented sanity. Now many people might not find her special brand of sanity all that alluring. But I think it made him feel secure just to see that it existed. Having watched your grandmother ruin your grandfather, I don’t think that your Great Granny Webster’s parsimonious side could disturb him all that much. And when he made those trips down to Hove to visit her he may even have liked her gloomy silences—his ears had been filled so often with the chuckles of the mad ...”

  Many more years went by, and I lost interest in Great Granny Webster. I no longer tried to puzzle out why my father had liked her, why he had swung back on the family pendulum and deliberately attempted to seek out in that correct-living, ungenerous old woman the very same rock-like qualities that my grandmother had obviously unsuccessfully tried to flee.

  I never wrote to Great Granny Webster as I had promised. I never visited her again. She became nothing more than a musty oppressive memory, she had cut herself off so successfully. On the rare occasions I thought about her, I assumed that she must have died long ago. But I was quite wrong. She had not died. She had been living on in exactly the same way that she had always lived in Hove.

  4

  IT WAS FIFTEEN years after my visit that I suddenly got a telephone call in London from a voice that I hardly recognised, for it had become so weak and squeaky.

  “This is your great-grandmother’s maid. Do you remember me? This is Richards.”

  Great Granny Webster had passed away four days ago. It had been a slow death, cancer of the throat. She had carried on her usual life to the end. She had been very brave.

  Richards seemed to be crying on the telephone. I asked her if there was anything I could do. She said she really hoped that I would come down to Hove next Friday for the service. Apparently none of the rest of the family were coming.

  “That would have upset her so much,” Richards said. “You remember how she always liked everything to be correct. She would never have thought it was right that I should be her only mourner. Poor Mrs Webster—she would have seen it as such a disgrace.”

  I told Richards that I would come down, and I found out the time and place of the ceremony.

  The following Friday I took the train down to Brighton. It was a freezing February day and the landscape from the train window was swathed in an odious mist that turned it the colour of concrete. On the train I felt cold, restless and annoyed. I had never wanted to be a hypocritical chief mourner at the grave of a woman I couldn’t mourn. I felt imposed upon by Richards who had pressured me into attending this funeral, disgusted by my own weakness in not refusing to go. I had much the same resentful feeling that I had once had when Great Granny Webster forced me to take rides in her Rolls-Royce. Even from the dead she seemed to be tyrannising me with her selfish wishes; once again she was forcing me to do something grim and boring and distasteful. It was ludicrous that I should be making this unpleasant, lonely train journey just because Great Granny Webster would have wanted her funeral to be correct.

  “I am certainly not going to supervise personally the removal of her furniture,” I thought. “There has to be some limit to the disagreeable tasks that she can be allowed to assign to one. She has managed to make me attend her burial and that will really have to be enough for her. If I discover in the future that I have become the unlucky owner of her dreaded bed, I am going to leave it forever uncollected in Hove. If moving men loosen the carved pineapple, it is a matter of complete indifference to me.” These rebellious thoughts were instantly followed by an uncomfortable feeling of superstitious terror. It was almost as if I feared some kind of awful retribution from her irate and punitive upright corpse, which suddenly seemed to have invisibly entered the railway carriage to listen to them.

  All I could pray was that Richards had never been told about her ancient employer’s wishes with regard to the disposal of her possessions. If, by ill-luck, Richards did happen to be aware of them, I was already beginning to have the horrible suspicion that Great Granny Webster would as usual end up having her way. I realised now that my irrational fear of her accusing shade was bound to be aggravated by any-thing accusing in the attitude of her maid. I also realised that Richards could not fail to be shocked to her very core if I dared to disregard her employer’s posthumous plans, for Richards would see this gesture of defiance as a callous act that mocked and questioned the validity of her whole life, which had been devoted to obeying the very letter of Great Granny Webster’s innumerable laws.

  There was a biting sea wind when I got out at the station in Brighton. Being extremely anxious not to go anywhere near Great Granny Webster’s villa, I took a taxi directly to the church in Hove. The graveyard was completely empty when I arrived, except for the lonely little one-eyed figure of Richards, who was standing praying by a large hole that had been dug in the frozen earth. When she saw me she stopped praying, and she came hobbling over and squeezed my hand.

  If the last fifteen years had aged Richards, it was not all that obvious. She had always looked so eerily ancient she now scarcely seemed more so. She had always been bent over with arthritis, and if she was even more humped and crooked it was hardly perceptible. The whiskers that sprouted from her chin looked much more snowy and brittle, but otherwise the only thing that seemed strange and new about her was her black funeral hat and costume, for I had never before seen her wearing anything but her Edwardian parlour-maid’s clothes. I noticed that the patch that covered her damaged eye matched the rest of her black outfit so exactly that she seemed to be wearing it like a subtle accessory to complete the perfection of her funereal attire.

  It startled me to see that Richards’s good eye was scarlet and watering. I wondered if she could possibly be crying because she regretted the death of Great Granny Webster. Surely she could only be weeping out of terror at her own shaky future. This death had to come like a lethal thunderbolt to a woman of Richards’s age. Wretched as her life must have been, slaving for over fifty years for that unbending and selfish old lady, at least she had once been sheltered by the roof of the dark Hove villa, whereas now this crippled woman in her nineties would have to start life anew.

  When I found Richards praying by that open grave, it is very possible that she was praying for herself, that she already had a premonition of her ex-employer’s will that was to be read a few weeks later, when she was to learn that Great Granny Webster had left every single penny of her enormous fortune to the Society for Euthanasia, so that when Richards had to start her life again, she would start it with nothing but the support of Great Granny Webster’s chair.

  “It was really good of you to come,” Richards said.

  “I’m very glad to be here,” I lied.

  “You always meant so much to her,” Richards murmur
ed, and I wondered if she quite realised that she was lying too.

  Richards and I then ran out of conversation, and as there was nothing else to do we went back to the hole in the ground and waited there silently side by side. The churchyard was quite exceptionally depressing. Richards once again bent her head in prayer and I copied her awkwardly. All that I was still praying for was that I should be allowed to get through this chilling burial service, to get back on a train to London, without Richards begging me on behalf of the dead that I stay on in Hove to supervise the removal of all that ugly furniture.

  On our left a hideous barrack-like church loomed over its own churchyard with walls that were made of flint. All the gravestones around us were covered with ice. The special desolate silence of Great Granny Webster seemed to hang over the whole area. Everything in the graveyard was so grim and grey and forbidding that the whole place might have been purposely created in order to receive her. I felt that I was going to be frozen alive waiting there alone with Richards. Cruel blasts of sea air kept whistling in from the channel. One of these blasts lifted Richards’s black hat right off her head and whirled it across a great row of graves. I ran after it and got it back for her. She thanked me hysterically and I noticed that without her hat she was almost completely bald.

  As Richards and I once again took up our mournful and respectful positions beside the hole in the earth, I suddenly wished that Aunt Lavinia could be with me at this funeral. With her appreciative eye for the ludicrous she would have enjoyed its more macabre and comic aspects. But Aunt Lavinia had finally succeeded in killing herself six months before, dying in her Mayfair house from an overdose of vodka and sleeping pills. She had slipped out of life in much the same eel-like way that she had slipped out of her many marriages and romances. Although I knew that she had seen the whole thing as a charade that could entertain her for a while, but in the end lacked sufficient appeal to make her wish to participate indefinitely in its nonsensicalities, her death had still come as a jolting shock both to me and to her many friends. For, just as when she had cut her veins in her bath, she had let no one suspect that she felt in any way depressed.

  She had telephoned me on the morning of the day she died, to tell me that she had just bought a new pekinese puppy, who was so amazingly well-bred that he had only one tiny shrivelled ball. She sounded childishly proud and thrilled with her little dog. She begged me to lunch with her the following week, so that she could show him off to me. She was planning to call him Sleeve because she had heard that the ancient emperors of China saw the pekinese as an animal that brought good luck and therefore used to carry these little pug-nosed dogs around with them tucked inside the giant sleeves of their silken robes. “I may start to copy those wise old emperors, darling,” Aunt Lavinia said to me. “One can always do with a bit of luck up one’s sleeve ...”

  She was hoping to enter her new puppy in some important competition at Crufts. He had the right hair-feathers on his paws and that could earn him several points. With his perfect paws, his strikingly single, seed-like ball and his impressive pedigree, she was convinced he would win a prize. When she stopped chatting to me on the telephone, it didn’t for a moment occur to me that I would never talk to her again.

  That same evening, just a few hours before she died, she had gone to the opera with a group of friends and on to a supper party, where she gave the appearance of enjoying herself much more than anyone else who was present. If she was already harbouring a secret plan for her own destruction, this may well have given the occasion a special magic and poignancy for her. Aunt Lavinia always had a near-religious belief that it was wicked to inflict one’s personal despair on others. Any display of self-pity or self-dissatisfaction she saw as a social cruelty that was very nearly criminal. Having been plagued all her life by a terror of ennui and seeing human unhappiness as a condition so commonplace as to be boring, she stubbornly refused to burden other people with her own. If her friends became lachrymose or whining she disliked it. She chose to appear unfailingly gay and scatterbrained and easily diverted, out of human consideration and bravery. A very different character from Great Granny Webster, Aunt Lavinia in some ways had been just as stoical.

  Standing in the oppressive suburban graveyard of Hove and feeling a sudden sadness at the loss of his flighty and humorous sister, I missed my father. Missing him, I realised that for me he would always be lost in a much more serious and final way than Aunt Lavinia and Great Granny Webster could ever be. Like someone born before the invention of the camera, he had disappeared too early for my memory to have been able to form any device that could retain him as a distinct outline. Even missing him was futile, for it was like missing a foreign country which one had never visited and never would. No anecdotes or reminiscences from his contemporaries could ever give him a face. He would remain like a wobbly circle drawn by a child that says “Look at my man,” not having the skill to put in the eyes, the nose and the mouth.

  Waiting for Great Granny Webster’s burial I found it strange and distressing to realise that the old lady could never be lost for ever like my father. Whether I wished to keep her or not, she would always remain with me because I could remember her as a living concrete entity, whereas he was merely an absence, an abstraction without voice or flesh.

  I had met Great Granny Webster only a few years after my father’s death, but that small time-lag had been crucial. Her image would live on while his would vanish, because unlike him she had appeared with the beginning of my memory’s photography. Great Granny Webster would enter this hole in front of which Richards and I were embarrassedly praying, but she would never stay there. In my imagination she would have an after-life in which she existed for ever in her dark Hove drawing-room, living and breathing in her upright chair. My father could never have any such resurrection. He could never emerge from his jungle grave in Burma to live again and breathe.

  And thinking about those who were buried I thought about my grandmother Dunmartin, who was still living, just as lost as the dead, in the mental hospital where she had been placed long ago by her mother. I wondered whether Richards had informed her that Great Granny Webster had finally relinquished her tenacious life-grip, whether the unfortunate woman was in any state in which this fact could have either interest or meaning for her.

  I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.

  As Richards and I kept on waiting by the hole, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what we were waiting for.

  “What are the arrangements?” I whispered to Richards.

  “She ought to be appearing soon,” she said.

  And then I saw her coming. The way she was arriving was so completely correct that I could hardly believe it. I had expected her to come in a coffin on top of a hearse. But instead she was very slowly crunching up the gravel towards the church in a huge black Rolls-Royce, which was being driven at exactly the same dignified creep with which she had once liked to cruise along the sea-front of Hove.

  Inside the Rolls-Royce was an undertaker from the local crematorium. He made an impressive inky silhouette against the windows of the car as he sat on the seats at the back, holding Great Granny Webster in an urn on his knee.

  The undertaker took her inside the church, and after a few minutes she came out again and was carried across the graveyard by a clergyman.

  The clergyman was very bald, like Richards, and he had the sort of chubby child’s face that should have been pink. But the poor man was so cold, as he was wearing only his surplice and his stole, that his cheeks and all the skin of his hairless head had turned a bright violet blue. He held her urn high above his head and blessed it.

  Her urn looked very sedate and tall and upright and narrow. It held itself with exactly the same impeccable posture with which she had held herself in life. Everything about her burial was so correct at the beginning. Everything was so
right, so very much what she would have wished.

  And then everything seemed to go wrong.

  All at once the clergyman started gabbling through the burial service. In all fairness, the man looked really deathly cold and the wind was lifting up his clerical skirts and swelling them round his ankles like sails. One could understand why he seemed to be trying to get the service over as soon as possible so that he could get back inside his church.

  “Earth to earth. Dust to dust ...” He held the urn like someone who was pouring a gallon of petrol out of a can and Great Granny Webster started gushing out into the hole in the grass.

  “Earth to earth. Dust to dust ...” But as she came streaming out of the urn she didn’t look at all like dust. That was the thing that was so very shocking. I kept expecting her ashes to be a greyish brown, but instead they were dazzlingly white. There was something profoundly unsuitable and disturbing about their brilliant whiteness. There was an incongruity in the way this extreme whiteness made her appear gay and bright and festive, the very opposite of anything she had ever liked in life. In no way did it seem at all correct, that Great Granny Webster should look frivolously snowy and sweet, almost exactly like castor sugar that was being poured into a bowl as an ingredient for a wedding cake. There was something very jarring and ironic in the fact that this woman who had always insisted on eating only saccharine for reasons of economy should be making her last earthly appearance in the guise of first-grade expensive sugar.

  And then there seemed to be much too much of Great Granny Webster to be emptied into the ground. There was something almost obscene in the sheer quantities in which she was emerging. I had expected that the clergyman would just take one handful of her ashes and throw them into the grave as a symbol. But instead he kept impatiently tipping the urn and his frozen face looked exasperated at the way that her white powdery substance would not stop flowing out.