Great Granny Webster (7 page)

Aunt Lavinia finished painting her last fingernail and held out her hands in front of her, keeping her fingers stiffly separated, so that the wet varnish would not smudge.

“In one sense he was rather a character, that Dr Kronin,” she said reflectively. “By no means an enjoyable character. By no means a figure that one would ever wish to have in charge of one in a hospital. But in his peculiar way the amazing thing is that I think he really viewed himself as a romantic. So that with his incomprehensible mentality one has to admit there was something quite individual about the little pig all the same ...”

Aunt Lavinia blew impatiently on her wet nails.

“I wonder why so many men love to think that all one's other lovers have always cheated one and let one down. It's such a very common masculine notion. The idea seems to tickle their vanity and it makes them feel powerful and potent or something. I've always found that whole concept the most footling rubbish. If I've ever had the feeling of being cheated, I've never felt it was the fault of men ...”

Aunt Lavinia shook her fingers impatiently.

“How boring nails are. I can't think why one bothers with them. It's like Chinese torture, waiting for them to dry. I've been talking a blue streak. You are certainly very kind the way you come round to listen to the blather of your silly old suicidal aunt. You are so young still. You are not quite out of the gawky listening stage. I feel guilty that I take advantage of you. I can still dazzle you with all my nonsense.”

For a moment I wondered whether there had ever been such a figure as Dr Kronin, whether she had invented him or drastically improved him in order to shock and entertain me. The stories Aunt Lavinia told tended to be extremely vivid and somewhat surrealist, and she liked to tell them with great emphasis and well-planned timing. It was the zest and joy with which she told them that gave them their validity, and she made it hardly matter whether all the details were strictly true.

“It's heaven for me that you have come to visit me on my red-letter day, the first day of my deliverance.” Aunt Lavinia blew me a kiss from her bed. “Never having had a daughter of my own—it's a delight for me to have someone younger to laugh with and confide in ...”

Aunt Lavinia's slanted brown quizzical eyes examined me appraisingly, as I sat sunk down in the squishy cushions of her comfortable chintz-covered armchair.

“As you may have noticed, it's also fun for me to have someone that I can boss around a bit,” she said. “I feel I have the right to be frank with you. I can tell you when your clothes really strike me as too deeply awful.”

The sun was streaming through the impeccably polished panes of Aunt Lavinia's large bay windows and creating brilliant pools of light on her white carpets. All at once she placed her hand across her eyes, and her newly varnished scarlet fingernails were like oval spots of blood against her pale forehead.

“The sun looks very odd to me today,” she said. “It's like meeting some old friend one went to school with and never quite expected—or in some way never hoped—to meet again.”

Aunt Lavinia was a chain-smoker and she lit another Turkish cigarette, which she first placed in an amber holder. The sweetish, musky smell of her tobacco mingled with the powerful, haunting smell of her beautiful lilies.

“To get back to you,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I thought about you a lot when I was lying there in the hospital—that is, of course, when the peccadillos of my psychiatrist and my other various vicissitudes were not preoccupying my mind. I don't know why, but I found myself feeling very alarmed for you.”

She pointed to her windows.

“Please, darling. Could you please pull a bit of curtain. The sun is wonderful, of course. But somehow I can't face quite so much gorgeous sun right now.”

I got up and pulled her curtains, and she thanked me.

“You are an angel,” she said. “I am lucky to have a niece who bothers to bother with her capricious old aunt at all.”

She smoked silently for a moment, drawing the Turkish smoke into her lungs and then blowing it out in deliberately careful rings.

“I don't quite know why I felt such a curious anxiety for you when I was in hospital. I imagine it was just my debilitated state, combined with auntish foolishness. That's poor Poo Poo scratching on my door, darling. Could you be a saint and let the little fellow in?”

I let Poo Poo in, and Aunt Lavinia greeted him with rapturous enthusiasm. He was pleased by her excitement and rolled and wriggled on her white silk coverlet, while she patted and praised him and told him that for her he would always be the dog of all dogs.

“To get back to why I felt such anxiety for you while I was in hospital ...” Aunt Lavinia had just pacified Poo Poo by resting him on her lap and allowing him to chew on a rubber bone. “I kept wondering if it was quite normal the way you often just sit there so quietly being an excellent listener, looking very serious and charming and all that, but not contributing very much at all.”

She got up from the bed, and there was something uncharacteristically brusque and almost irritable in her movements. She said she was going to find her dog some charcoal biscuits, and she rummaged in a drawer. Then she flopped down again in a relaxed position on her bed, feeding Poo Poo the black crumbly squares, and it surprised me that someone who was in many ways so very fastidious seemed not to care that the blackened saliva from Poo Poo's jaws was dribbling down and making dark stains on her white and spotless bed cover.

“Thinking about you,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I felt you still have much too much youthful over-intensity. I think you should try to lose some of that. I also feel that in general you should try to be more socially at ease and expansive. Shyness is all right. But only to a point, and yours can sometimes seem quite oppressive.”

Aunt Lavinia threw me another kiss.

“I adore you. You are at ease with me because you know me very well and I can make you laugh and draw you out of your shell. But I've sometimes seen you with other people and you haven't opened your mouth the entire evening. You've given the appearance of being just about as vivacious, interesting and delightful to meet as our mutual relation in Hove—that sainted old sourpuss Mrs Webster ...”

Aunt Lavinia saw my look of horror, and she held out both her arms to me in an affectionate gesture as if she wanted to hug me.

“I'm exaggerating,” she said. “Don't take me literally. I find that one often has to exaggerate in order to make one's point. I don't think that anyone has ever felt that you in any way resemble old Granny Webster. But I still think you should remember her example and let it be a caution to you ...”

Aunt Lavinia peeled off her nylon stockings and said she couldn't decide whether it was worth the effort to varnish her toenails.

“I feel a need to do something while I'm delivering lectures. If I was a lady of the
ancien régime
I would be scolding you and also doing my
petit point
.”

She decided not to paint her toenails—that no one would care if she painted them anyway. She said she was only going to lecture me for a few more minutes and then she would try and think of something that would be fun for us both to do.

“No one has ever thought you were like old Mrs Webster,” Aunt Lavinia said. “But I'm afraid, darling, they have found you rather odd in the way you sit there at parties looking so goggle-eyed and tongue-tied. When you are with strangers you are so withdrawn that everyone finds your presence rather alarming. You just sit there staring at everyone in that intense, tormented way. You really must try to stop doing that, because it makes people nervous. They wonder whether you've got something gravely wrong with you. They wonder whether you are quite all right in the head.”

Aunt Lavinia was clearly worried that she might have been too critical and upset me. She hadn't intended to be harsh and deliver such a sermon. She explained that she was in a funny mood today, that when she had lashed out at me she had really been lashing out at herself.

“When I was your age,” she said, “—you will never believe it now—but I was so shy and silent and bottled-up I was generally considered to be retarded. I was over-intense as well. Then somehow all that went ...”

Aunt Lavinia fed Poo Poo another charcoal biscuit, which he crunched up, dribbling more black saliva on to the white cover on her bed.

“I suppose I shouldn't worry about you,” she said. “As you get older no doubt you'll change automatically, just like I did. You will learn all the tricks. You will dress much better, and talk much more, and listen much less. And you'll start to realise that it never does one much good to take anything too seriously at all.”

She took one of her poodle's charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. “Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like many things in life, it's rather hard to tell which,” she said.

Aunt Lavinia was silent for a moment and lay back on her bed smoking.

“When you are my age, darling, shyness will no longer be your problem. As the years go by you will change dramatically. No one can predict anyone else's future. I've no idea what will happen to you. But once you reach your early thirties I've always had the strong suspicion—and to this I must add, God help you—you'll probably be very like me.”

Aunt Lavinia's house was very warm. She liked to have log-fires burning and her central-heating turned on even in the summer. Although her bedroom was rather like a hot-house and fragrant with the smell of her lilies, I had exactly the same feeling of chill I had experienced in the bleak, cold, flowerless drawing-room of Great Granny Webster when that old lady had predicted that eventually I would be very like her. Quite suddenly I felt much too uncomfortably aware of the nearness of Aunt Lavinia's bathroom, of the fact that it directly adjoined this gay and scented bedroom into which the golden shafts of the sun still penetrated despite the drawn curtains.

Aunt Lavinia was intensely aware of the effect she had on other people, and she immediately sensed that I was unhappy with the trend her conversation had been taking. She quickly switched to a different and lighter topic. In a while she planned to take me out and give me the most delicious lunch, she said. She had found a superb and “madly expensive” restaurant round the corner, where one could have the most succulent oysters she had yet found in London.

“I always force Rodney to take me there, darling. You don't know about Rodney yet. He's my newest flame. You'll love him. He's very lean and bronzed and sexy. He's slightly a bore, but not such a bad one that you could call him an ‘important bore.' Rodney's just not very intelligent. But then he's not the kind of man who's meant to be ...”

Aunt Lavinia said she would love to offer me some morning coffee, but there was a problem: she hadn't got the courage to ring for her maid, Agnes, and ask her to bring us up a pot from the kitchen.

“I can't quite face meeting her eye right at this moment. You see, Agnes was the one who found me. I still feel the humiliation too strongly. Can you imagine the terrible indignity of being discovered stark naked in a blood-drenched bath by one's maid?”

She was in the most frightful dilemma. She was uncertain whether she would ever again feel comfortable with Agnes. She felt she might actually have to get rid of her, because there was such a danger that their relationship might be forever tainted by deep and mutual embarrassment.

“And she's a gem, darling. So it's a tragedy. She's divine. The whole thing couldn't be more maddening ...”

As she was unable to offer me coffee, Aunt Lavinia decided we should go on gossiping and enjoying our cigarettes, and in a while we would have some marvellous drink—much more enjoyable and bracing than coffee. A little later we would go out and eat a late and leisurely lunch with masses of chablis and oysters. After that we would go to Harrods and look at the spring coats. Apparently Rodney had offered to buy Aunt Lavinia a new coat if she saw one she liked, and she felt certain he wouldn't mind getting me a new one too.

“Actually,” she said, “I hate spring coats. If it's spring, why the hell should one need a coat?” She thought she had shocked me, and she explained that she was not being ungrateful to Rodney. “How could the poor angel be expected to know that all coats are very depressing to me. We had to wear them so much indoors—when we lived at Dunmartin Hall ...”

She squeezed Poo Poo slightly too roughly, and he gave a little yelp. “Oh, poor Poo Poo,” she whispered apologetically, and she kissed the insides of his ears. She asked me if I found her bedroom too warm. She said that she loved to overheat—that she tended to forget that other people could be miserable sweltering in the tropical conditions in which she lived.

“I rarely feel warm enough in England,” she said. “That's why I so adored my trip to India, darling. I really must try to make Rodney take me back there. I don't know why I like heat so much. Maybe it's because I have a cold heart ...”

Aunt Lavinia gave a little shiver, and just for a moment her eyes had a curiously unfocussed and scared expression. Then she was laughing again. She said she felt certain that, if ever Great Granny Webster came up from Hove and paid her a visit, the old lady would instantly drop dead from the shock.

I asked her to explain, although I could think of many things in her house which Great Granny Webster might find very shocking indeed.

“My radiators, darling! My criminal radiators! Your Great Granny Webster would never recover if she saw them. The beastly old sticklebat would go to her grave, she would be so mortified. You know how much she has always cared about the family name. She would never again be able to hold up her head from the shame if she knew that someone as closely related to her as me had sunk to having central heating!”