Great Granny Webster (13 page)

Tommy Redcliffe found something oppressive in the isolation that my grandfather was so glad of. He thought it odd that a man who owned such a large estate in Northern Ireland should feel that he had nothing to do with the country he had always lived in. My grandfather and both his children had been educated in England. All the year round he looked forward to Christmas, because that was the time when guests came over to stay with him from England. He took no part or interest in Northern Irish politics. He read only English newspapers. He had Northern Irish servants, but he had made no Northern Irish friends. He was a Protestant, but the strong religious prejudices and conflicts of the province meant nothing to him. He had always refused to employ Catholics, not because he disliked them but because he had been told since childhood that it would be dangerous to have them in the house, as the Protestant community would not like it and if he was to outrage them in this deliberate way Dunmartin Hall might easily be burnt down. He went to the family chapel every Sunday for much the same reason. He slept discreetly all through the rhetorical and rousing sermon, and that often seemed the time when he was most at rest from his worries. He wanted to be known as a regular churchgoer, for he felt that in his position it was unwise to expose himself to local criticism. He lived in Dunmartin Hall as if it was an English island and he was a man who had been shipwrecked. As my grandmother became more and more disquieting as a hostess, he became increasingly lonely and marooned. He hesitated before he invited his old English friends to make the tiring journey by train and boat. He could offer them good shooting, but he had lost confidence that he could offer them much else that would make their stay with him very pleasant. My father had exactly the same feeling. Tommy Redcliffe was the only friend he ever invited to Dunmartin Hall, for he trusted him to be comparatively uncritical because he had known him for so long.

My grandfather always had various schemes for salvaging his disastrous estate. He was going to plant cabbages on a massive scale and sell them commercially. He was going to convert his empty stables and turn them into a pig-farm. All his many fears and plans for his estate kept him occupied. From the start of her marriage, my grandmother had been much less fortunate. She hated riding, and as she never went hunting she made no contact with her neighbours in the country-side. Being frightened of horses and not enjoying any other form of sport, she had been doomed, Tommy Redcliffe thought, ever since she first arrived as a young bride at Dunmartin Hall. If she had chosen to retreat into an ill-omened phantasmagoric fairyland, he found it all too understandable that she might wish to live in flight from her dismal reality.

Tommy Redcliffe found it hard to imagine anything much worse than being forced to live in that lonely and draughty house all the year round if you had nothing at all to do. He remembered watching my grandmother when she didn't realise she was being watched. When she came out of her room at night, he was struck by the way she kept herself always on the move. Her energies seemed pent-up to bursting point, and she clearly felt a need to release them by being in a perpetual state of pointless motion. He could never forget the disturbing image that she had left him as she went restlessly wandering through the bleak cold corridors of Dunmartin Hall where the paper was stripping off in great sodden furls from the wall. She had the unseeing stare of the somnambulist as she wandered aimlessly in and out of unused rooms, which were mostly stacked like separate junk shops with the dusty mess and the unsorted belongings of the house's previous owners.

Once or twice he had seen that she was crying as she hovered for a moment in one of her freezing state-rooms, which were littered with that special miscellaneous Anglo-Irish rubble of unopened and unpayable bills, tennis rackets with broken strings, stone hot-water bottles without stoppers, stuffed pheasants in cracked glass cases, old yellowing copies of horse magazines, torn pages of the London
Times
. Seeing her silently weeping in these rooms, where the antique furniture was pitted with wormwood and piled high with girths and saddles, where a tangle of fishing rods lay intertwined with the sprawling tack of rusty bridles, while croquet hoops lay scattered at random with old-fashioned guns and black rubber wellingtons on ping-pong and billiard tables, he had wondered if she was crying because the sight of so many abandoned relics of once-played games was painful to her, reminding her of all the games that the prison of her marriage had never allowed her to play.

One day he had seen her dancing alone in the unused ballroom. The roof was especially bad there and the floor was covered with a mixture of jam pots, frying pans, horse-buckets and antique Chinese vases which had been meticulously placed to catch the jets and drips. He had the depressing suspicion that she was seeing herself as a fairy, and it was a melancholy sight to watch this demented woman dancing without music, winding slowly in and out of all the obstacles that were strewn on the unpolished parquet, and avoiding the rain water that kept monotonously plopping down through the ceiling's innumerable cracks.

He saw her as having an eerie pathos like the ancient ghosts of the murdered Irish who were reputed to haunt the mildewed corridors strewn with tiger rugs which this unfortunate had come to own, while he watched her flitting from room to room as if desperately seeking a little warmth in this huge house where the firelogs were usually too green and rain-drenched to give out much more than thin puffs of acrid smoke.

My grandfather was constantly debating whether or not he should take his wife to London, where he felt she might have more effective treatment than she got from her Belfast doctor. It took him years to make up his mind to move her. He was plagued by black images of what would happen to Dunmartin Hall if he wasn't there to run the estate.

Tommy Redcliffe found my grandfather's dilemma unintelligible. As he saw it, the estate was so horribly mismanaged anyway that my grandfather's absence could hardly affect it. It was impossible to understand how this harassed but well-meaning man was prepared to sacrifice his own life and that of my grandmother to a house that brought them so little joy, merely because he happened to own it. It shocked him to realise that my grandfather's whole sense of himself had become inseparable from the burden of maintaining his inherited possessions.

“This place is so beautiful that it would break my heart if it was ever to pass into the hands of strangers,” my grandfather once said to him. “Every bough of every apple tree is precious to me because I climbed it as a child.”

My grandfather told him that the air at Dunmartin Hall was fresher than anywhere else in the world. “It has a special balmy sweet quality and it tastes of the salt from the Irish sea. I adore waking up in the morning and knowing that I'm breathing air that's purer than anywhere else in the universe.”

When my grandfather talked like this, Tommy Redcliffe thought him nearly as unhinged as his unfortunate wife.

At Oxford, Tommy Redcliffe had often felt a terror for my father, fearing that when he eventually inherited Dunmartin Hall he would get sucked into the same trap as my grandfather and waste his life in an unrewarding attempt to retrieve an estate that was so emotionally and financially draining that, as was obvious to any outsider, it should long ago have been sold.

“I couldn't have known it then,” he said to me. “But I need never have worried about that. Ivor owned Dunmartin Hall for such a brief period—and then of course the war came. I don't think that all the traditional dilemmas and the insolubles that he inherited with that Ulster house had the time to trouble him very much at all ...”

When my grandfather finally moved my grandmother to London, her state of mind had deteriorated so disastrously that it became clear that she had been moved much too late. The good fairies that had once danced in her psyche seemed to have abandoned her, and it was as if violent and destructive forces had taken a dark control of her mind. She smashed the library windows at Dunmartin Hall. She made several savage attacks on the servants, who all left in a terrified body, leaving my grandfather to cook and clean for himself. When he found his wife setting fire to the faded curtains of his drawing-room, my grandfather's mind was finally made up. Having such a passionate and proprietary feeling for his house, he no longer felt justified in keeping her there while she obviously endangered it.

She was given heavy sedation, and with the help of her Belfast doctor my grandfather moved her to London, where he rented a house in Chelsea. For the next two years the move appeared to suit her. She was treated by London specialists and her recovery astonished everyone. Her maniac savagery subsided, and she became interested in doing water-colours. She began to have long periods in which she was both docile and lucid.

My father got married while he was still at Oxford, and my brother and I were born at Dunmartin Hall, not because either of my parents wished to live there, but because we had to live somewhere while my father looked for a London job.

My mother was a Londoner, and like my grandmother she was social and very young and had no sporting or agricultural interests. She detested Dunmartin Hall from the first moment she saw it. She was horrified to find herself inheriting the shambles in which Grandmother Dunmartin had left it. She saw its demoralised condition as being beyond human repair and she very much resented the fact that it seemed to be generally expected that she should devote her life to remedying it. She would have liked to live in a neat warm little flat in London and found it both cruel and ironic that it was poverty that had forced her to inhabit an icy Northern Irish palace. She felt that every room was haunted by her predecessor's insanity, and she was terrified by the way the wind made the warped window frames and loose floorboards creak, and far-off doors never stopped banging in the night. She still did her best to get the house functioning in a more orderly fashion, and once again it became feasible to invite English guests to visit Dunmartin Hall. But the effort and pain it cost her created many difficulties in my parents' brief marriage.

While my mother was suffering in Northern Ireland, Grandfather Dunmartin was in Chelsea dreaming every minute about getting back to Ulster. He was delighted by his wife's mental improvement, and he was only waiting for permission from her doctors to be allowed to move her back to live with him again at Dunmartin Hall.

When my grandmother was invited over to my brother's christening, no one could have foreseen that it would bring on her fatal relapse. No one ever quite knew why this chalk-faced woman with bright gold curls once again started to act like a spirit possessed. Maybe it was the insidious smells of the house where she had passed so many idle and profitless years, or just the sight of a festooned baby in a cradle, that triggered off her ancient phobia. Maybe it was renewed exposure to the challenging and reproving silence of Great Granny Webster. For that old lady had travelled up by train all the way from Hove to Scotland, and she finally arrived by boat having endured the most calamitous crossing of the Irish channel, during which she had stood on the steamer's deck, stiff and uncomplaining as a mast, while the foam from the winter sea spotted her black furs and mingled, to her disgust and horror, with the wind-tossed vomit of Ulster labourers and a delegation of Protestant nuns, who kept moaning and praying to God as they staggered to the shiprails and the pitch and roll of the turbulence made them lose their lunch.

Possibly it was the unwelcome reminder of the superhuman stamina of that stalwart old lady that created feelings of inadequacy in my grandmother which were violent enough to destroy her delicate equilibrium. For Great Granny Webster arrived at the door of Dunmartin Hall having survived her atrocious sea journey and then having borne the fatiguing discomforts of a long and bumpy car ride after being met at the fish-smelling docks of Larne. And although she had not slept all night and her brown pouched eyes looked tired and disgusted beyond measure, she expressed no self-pity and her whole demeanour was chillingly and accusingly brave.

After my grandmother's hysterical seizure at my brother's christening party, my grandfather took her instantly back to London, but the town no longer seemed able to calm her. She became increasingly savage and uncontrollable. She continually raved and ranted. She no longer had moments when she was rational. My grandfather developed stomach ulcers. He hired trained nurses to stay with his wife day and night, but she was cunning and kept escaping from their care. For days she would be lost on the streets of London. She became insanely extravagant. She went tripping into shops and ordered expensive objects and clothes at random; she bought three diamond tiaras and some ruby rings from a jeweller in Bond Street and arranged for the bill to be sent to my grandfather. She slept out on the grass in Kensington Gardens—maybe because she connected the place with fairies. Several times she was arrested for unruly behaviour, and my grandfather had to use influential friends to keep her name out of the press.

My grandfather became so thin from worrying about his wife's ever-increasing madness and the expenses of her deranged spending sprees that he looked almost transparent. He was intensely unhappy living in London. Although in all his attitudes and his general orientation he appeared to feel himself to be English, he had sunk much too much time and worry into his Northern Irish house not to feel lost and miserable finding himself, in his middle age, exiled from it. He had friends in London, but he was bored and restless and gnawed by homesickness for the isolation and challenge of Dunmartin Hall, where he felt he had a function. My grandmother had become much too like an animal to be any kind of company for him. Her condition threatened him more than it had in Ulster, for he was unable to deflect the violent anxiety it caused him by sitting up half the night and studying the accounts of his farm and his estate.