Great Granny Webster (6 page)

“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 ...”

Once Aunt Lavinia was moved to her private room Dr Kronin soon came to visit her. She was asleep when he came in, because she had been given sedation, which made her feel very tired.

She woke up to find herself in what she described as “a situation of total and unexpected nightmare.” Dr Kronin was bending over her bed. He was breathing heavily and kissing the bandages on her wrists. “Little fool,” he kept repeating in throttled amorous tones. “What made you do it?”

She thought of screaming. She thought of slapping him across the face. But she felt too stunned to do anything. She closed her eyes, lay completely still and pretended she had gone back to sleep.

“I think I must have been paralysed by rage,” Aunt Lavinia said. “I've rarely felt such secret fury as I felt at that moment. I literally wanted to kill that doctor. I've never felt quite such a strong blood-lust for any other human being. If I'd had a sharp implement to hand, I know that nothing could have saved Dr Kronin.”

She had experienced his behaviour not only as a medical, but as a personal, violation of the most unforgivable nature. “He made me think that I was just about to burst a blood vessel,” Aunt Lavinia said. “It made me apoplectic to think that the same vile little man who had forbidden me to have a comb and a lipstick had dared to enter my private room in order to cover my bandages with his lascivious and perverted kisses.”

In retrospect, Aunt Lavinia felt she had probably made a mistake in lying there for so long making no protest and pretending she was in a coma. She had hoped he might get bored and go away if he got no reaction from her, but her lack of response had in no way had the effect on him that she was praying for.

“You know how some men seem to find unresponsive women very arousing. We must never forget about necrophiles. Well, unfortunately Dr Kronin seems to have been a man of that inclination ...”

Dr Kronin had started imploring her to open her eyes, to say something to him. He told her how beautiful she was, that he had wanted her from the first moment he had seen her in the public ward. “Poor sick soul. You need help. And I'm just the one who knows how to give it to you. I've helped other women in the same state as you—they loved it ... If you just relax and let me do what I want to do to you I can make you feel much better.”

Aunt Lavinia gave an exaggerated shudder. “Can you imagine the horror of having to listen to all that kind of insanity. I didn't know how far he would dare to go. But I can tell you, darling, I felt petrified ...”

Despite her shut eyes, it had been all too clear to Aunt Lavinia from the sounds Dr Kronin was making that he was working himself up. His breathing was becoming increasingly heavy and impassioned. He kept lifting her deliberately lead-heavy arms and covering them with his hot wet kisses. “Damn you,” he whispered. “Why do I find women suicides so exciting?”

She said that having first felt she was burning up with rage she then started to feel ice-cold. She had the sensation that she was lying naked in the snow somewhere near the North Pole and that any part of her body he touched might easily drop off from frost-bite.

She kept wondering whether it would bring Dr Kronin to his senses if she started screaming for the nurses.

“But I was in this odiously weak position, darling. Remember, the only thing I wanted in the world was to be released from the hospital. So I knew I had to play it very cool and canny. I knew I must never forget that although Dr Kronin had shown every indication that he was completely round the bend he was still an august figure of medical authority, and he had me in his power. If I was to start screaming for help, I was scared stiff he might claim I had gone berserk and take revenge with his strait-jackets and brain-shocks ...”

Dr Kronin's next move had been to describe to her in detail all the things he wanted to do to her, and everything he said she found so distasteful and obscene she preferred not to repeat it to me. The thing she had found most enraging in his whole seductive approach was that every crude and obscene suggestion he made to her was presented with a nauseating sentimentality, as though he believed the help he was offering would be therapeutic.

“You are ill. You mustn't keep fighting me,” Dr Kronin had whispered.

Aunt Lavinia found this admonition particularly absurd, considering the fact that he was addressing someone who so far had shown just about as much fighting spirit as a slab of industrial concrete.

Suddenly, his breathing sounding as loud as the puffing of a steam-roller, Dr Kronin clambered right up on to her bed, which was extremely narrow and surgical and less like a bed than a stretcher. He then lay on top of her and started heaving up and down.

“The whole scene was foul and foolish beyond belief,” Aunt Lavinia said. “But only
now
can I start to laugh about it. There he was, pointlessly humping and pumping away at the surface of my hospital blanket. It may sound funny to you. But I can really assure you, darling, I could see nothing funny about it at the time.”

As Dr Kronin became more and more agitated and courageous, she had felt his hands trying to pull away her sheet, his lips kissing her neck and her cheeks; and in a panic she opened her eyes to see his face looking gigantic and distorted as it loomed close to hers. She swore to me that never in her life would she be able to forget the close-up of his black-rimmed bi-focals, through which his eyes were gleaming “like two dazzling little yellow pinpoints of lust.”

Unable to tolerate the situation for one more second, she had suddenly given a violent jerking movement, and the force of her revulsion seemed to give her strength. Dr Kronin shot off the bed and landed with a crash on his back on the floor.

The bed was very high, so he had a nasty fall. He just lay there for a moment as if he was stunned. Then slowly he sat up and fumbled for his spectacles, which had become dislodged and were lying in the corner with one lens cracked. He put them back on his nose and felt the base of his back, screwing up his face and making unhappy wincing expressions.

“You shouldn't have done that,” he complained in pathetic accusing tones. “I've always had trouble with my back and I think now you may have made me slip a disc.”

Aunt Lavinia glared at him in silence as he sat there squatting on the floor, nursing his bruised spine. He looked so undignified and deflated that for a moment she almost felt some kind of unwilling pity for him. Nevertheless, she warned him that unless he got up and instantly left her room she was going to ring her bell and get some of the hospital attendants to have him removed.

All her former fear of his authority had gone. He reminded her now of a dog which had just had its nose rubbed in its own mess. She could tell by the embarrassed and imploring expression in the eyes behind the semi-cracked bi-focals that Dr Kronin had sobered up and was now starting to feel terrified of her.

“I'm afraid I've made rather a fool of myself,” he said.

Aunt Lavinia considered this such an understatement that she could see no point in giving any reply.

“Sometimes it can be hell being a man,” Dr Kronin muttered ruefully. He took out a handkerchief and wiped away the beads of perspiration that dotted his dome-like head.

“Have you ever wished you were dead?” he asked her, apparently quite oblivious of the tactlessness of his question.

“I know you think that I owe you an apology,” he added after a long silence.

Aunt Lavinia was amazed that he seemed to regard her need for an apology as some kind of neurotic quirk. She asked him sarcastically if he always treated his female patients in the same way that he had treated her.

“Very rarely,” Dr Kronin said.

There was something so naive and outrageously frank about this statement that Aunt Lavinia had found it perversely appealing.

“I saw you as special,” Dr Kronin said. “When I saw you lying there in the ward with your eyes all swollen from crying—you looked really special to me. I thought you looked so beautiful. And then I saw your bandages and something strange came over me ... I knew I was the only person in the world who understood you and could help you ...”

He got up and limped over to the mirror that hung above the basin in her room. He adjusted his collar and tie, which had become rumpled and crooked in his fall. He smoothed the back strands of his sparse hair and he dusted his dapper suit. His voice was emotional when he spoke again.

“I felt so protective towards you. Here is this beautiful woman, I thought to myself. Here is this beautiful creature and she feels cheated. All the men she has had in her life obviously have all let her down.”

Dr Kronin stared mournfully at his own image in the mirror and once again tried to smooth the remnants of his hair.

“I had the feeling that I was the man you had always been searching for, that if we could just be alone together for a little while I could release something inside you which no one had ever released before.”

Aunt Lavinia said she wished I could have seen what Dr Kronin looked like while he was making this speech, that one really had to see the man with one's own eyes before one could appreciate the grotesqueness of the idea that anyone could spend their life searching for him.

Aunt Lavinia rolled her eyes. “The conceit of the little brute!” she said in awestruck tones.

Dr Kronin had turned from the mirror and stared directly at her.

“Well, it clearly didn't work out like I hoped,” he said. “All I wanted to do was help you, and I failed. So what do I do now? I apologise.”

He suddenly gave Aunt Lavinia a stiff little bow.

“You will not be seeing me again,” he said. “Tomorrow I have to attend an important psychiatric conference in Manchester. I will see to it that you receive the best possible care while you remain in this hospital. I wish you all the luck in the world. I have to tell you that I feel extremely sorry for you.”

Dr Kronin then came over to Aunt Lavinia's bed. He lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips with all the reverence and gallantry of a courtier in a period play.

“There's just one last thing I want to say before I go. All my life I will never forget you.”

Once again he gave Aunt Lavinia one of his courtly little bows.

“Goodbye, unfortunate lady, goodbye,” he murmured portentously, and he picked up his black bag and walked out of the room.