Great Granny Webster (8 page)

Aunt Lavinia asked me if I had ever quite taken in the passionate, almost obsessional hatred that Great Granny Webster felt for central heating. I hadn't. But when I looked back on my stay in Hove I had to admit that I couldn't remember having seen any radiators in her house. I had thought she just happened not to have any. I had never realised that their absence was something so positive and vital to her.

“To Granny Webster,” Aunt Lavinia said, “central heating epitomises everything she most fears and despises in the modern world. Central heating is pure anathema to Great Granny Webster. She sees it not only as dangerously unhealthy, but as something very much worse—
nouveau riche
—and, to use her own words, ‘deeply common.'”

Aunt Lavinia drew in a strong and self-congratulatory breath, as though she were inhaling and relishing the warmth of her room.

“The whole idea of central heating has always been total torment to old Mrs Webster,” she said in tones of great satisfaction. “The wretched woman has seen it spreading like a plague to every house in England. She knows that it's all over London. And the thing I find even funnier—she has lived to see it penetrating her very citadel of gentility. She can hardly ignore the fact that it's all over Hove!”

The mischievous glee of Aunt Lavinia was so pronounced that I thought it a little cruel. Just for a second I felt a pang of sympathy for Great Granny Webster sitting there in her seclusion in Hove and feeling that this thing she found so terrible was spreading all around her.

“And there is nothing that that obnoxious old woman can do about it. That's what I find so delicious!” Aunt Lavinia's scarlet lips curled upwards and she gave a grin of sheer delight. “If she weren't such a passive character, your Great Granny Webster would probably like to go in and rip out with her own hands the radiators of every house that has treacherously succumbed to it. But all she can do is think continually about central heating, and she has to suffer it like she's decided to suffer everything else—in silence!”

Tears, black with mascara, were rolling down Aunt Lavinia's cheeks, she was laughing so much. She took a handkerchief and wiped them away. Then she went on to say that although I would never believe it, Great Granny Webster had once had a friend.

“I promise you, darling, Granny Webster really did once have a friend. Her name was Cecilia Menzies. She was another one of those dreadful old upright Scottish bean poles. Unfortunately she was much the same type of character as Mrs Webster.”

Great Granny Webster had known her friend from childhood and they had once shared the same governess when they were both girls long ago in Aberdeenshire. The lives of the two friends had gone in different directions, but for years they had continued to write. “No, I shouldn't say they ‘wrote' to each other,” Aunt Lavinia quickly corrected herself. “Old ladies like that never ‘write.' What I
really
should say is this. For ages the two of them ‘corresponded.'”

When Cecilia Menzies' husband had died, she had apparently followed the same pattern as Great Granny Webster and gone into retirement. She had bought herself a house in the South of France and gone out to live alone there.

“You won't believe it, darling, but old Mrs Webster never forgave Cecilia!” Once again Aunt Lavinia had to wipe her eyes, she was laughing so hard. “It was too perfect for words! Cecilia kept on trying to ‘correspond' with her. But her letters got no answer!”

Although, according to Aunt Lavinia, Cecilia Menzies was a woman who would far rather have died than have central heating in her house, her old friend still saw her as a traitor: she felt that she had sold out. For Cecilia Menzies had moved to a place where there was not the slightest merit or oddity in not having central heating, since with the warm and balmy climate no one required it.

“Old Mrs Webster felt that her friend had gone ‘soft,' darling. And from her point of view Cecilia
had
. If you wanted to try to survive the miseries of endless winters in an unheated house, it was perfectly all right, Granny Webster felt, to do it in a place which had odious, freezing sea-winds like Hove. But to go to live in the South of France—that was
not
all right. Your Great Granny Webster felt that the South of France was cheating ...”

Aunt Lavinia kept embracing Poo Poo, kissing him all over with a frenzied intensity, licking his cold wet black nose, apologising to him for having been away, sympathising with him for the way he must have missed her. Apart from this exaggerated behaviour and the sight of the bandages on her wrist, I found it hard to believe that someone in such an effervescent and carefree mood could that morning have come out of the mental wing of a hospital.

While she was laughing and joking, and burying her face in Poo Poo's knobbly white coat, I wondered if my father had been in any way like his sister. I found it very hard to visualise a masculine version of Aunt Lavinia. I also found it impossible to imagine any circumstances which would make her feel the slightest obligation or desire to make uncomfortable train trips to Hove in order to visit an unprepossessing old figure like Great Granny Webster.

“Your father used to say that Siberia started at Hove,” Aunt Lavinia said. “Ivor was so divine. It's too dreadful that you will never know him.” It was then that I asked her why my father seemed to have had such a curious attachment to his grim old grandmother.

Aunt Lavinia refused to believe that my father had ever been in the least attached to Great Granny Webster. “Who ever gave you such a terrifying idea? I've never heard of anything more creepy. No one in their right mind could possibly form an attachment to such a gruesome old water-drinker.” As she spoke she was diluting a huge mug of Guinness with some vintage champagne. She always claimed the mixture was the best pre-lunch drink, because it had some kind of alkaline effect that counteracted last night's hangover. “Oh no ... It wasn't in the least like you think, darling. Your father was one of the most impractical men in the whole world—but occasionally he could be quite crafty. Ivor was always in debt, as you know—his affairs were always in a mess. I think he suddenly remembered he had this old relative in Hove, that there she was, like an aged hen, squatting on her enormous fortune, and no doubt he saw his trips to Hove as quite a foxy future investment. Knowing Ivor, I would imagine he must have stoked himself up on brandy the whole way down on the Brighton train. So when he arrived he was probably so pie-eyed she couldn't asphyxiate him with the boredom of her company. I'm quite sure that if your father is looking down on us all from some cloud he would be the first to see the joke. Who would ever have thought that it would be Great Granny Webster who would be the one to out-fox
him
in the end? When Ivor wasted so much time making all those dreary train trips down to Hove he really would have had to laugh if he had known that she was the one who was going to send
him
the wreath.”

My father had been killed in Burma when I was nine, and I found it almost impossible to remember what he had been like. Death had obscured him as a reality and turned him into a phantom who remained completely elusive, because his image was always in a state of flux. He had become for me nothing more than a fluid, shifting composite of memory and fantasy, in which sometimes he could appear glorified and attractive, at other times much less so. I could remember a black-haired man playing tennis in white flannels, a black-haired man flushed from drinking port as he shouted and argued with his Oxford friends. The man seemed very ancient, but I realised that even this had to be a distortion, because at that time he had still been in his twenties. I found I could remember the smell of his tobacco when he came into my bedroom to say goodnight, that he had once told me to read Shakespeare because when I grew up and was very unhappy I would find every kind of human unhappiness perfectly expressed there. But all these memories were so arbitrary, misty and superficial that they in no way added up to any kind of satisfactory portrait, and they would all suddenly seem to be completely blotted out by a much more vivid, cleanly-etched and final image of three brown telegrams from the War Office, the first announcing his death, the second regretting the error and denying it, the third regretting that His Majesty had to confirm the information in the first.

S
OON AFTER
Aunt Lavinia's attempted suicide I had lunch with a man who had been a close friend of my father and known him since he was a child. Tommy Redcliffe was a semi-successful biographer. He was a gentle pleasant man, at that time in his middle-thirties. His hair was turning grey and his eyes looked wise and disappointed. He had an artificial limb, for he had lost a leg in the war. He had the manner, both retiring and restlessly enervated, of the cured alcoholic.

Tommy Redcliffe talked about my father with amused affectionate nostalgia, remembering the insanely drunken parties they had both so adored at Oxford. I was always puzzled by the way so many of my father's old friends seemed to have remained unmoving, as if they had been frozen in some dream memory of those pre-war university parties. They appeared to feel that nothing in their subsequent lives had ever equalled whatever excitement it was they had got from them. They still never managed to recreate the Oxford they had loved so much, in any sense that could convey its glamour. When they tried to describe the tipsy rowdiness of nights in smoky college rooms when the debutantes came down from London, their attempts to make it sound exhilarating only left me with an impression of a way of life which was destructive and brutal. Sons of aristocratic parents, they had formed a fashionable little clique which was selective in its membership and comprised of leaders and followers, like a gang. They seemed to have acquired a sense of strength and superiority from the pooling of energies, which is the appeal of gang-life. But their laughing nostalgia when they remembered how someone in their set had been sick on the floor, or passed out, or insulted a stranger, or crashed his girl-friend's car, never could counteract my feeling that what they now remembered as precious moments must also have been in many ways unpleasant. It was the mood of that pre-war Oxford which remained lost for me—the high spirits, hope and recklessness, the sense of comradeship made closer through shared jokes and rebellion. This mood was too fragile to be resurrected many years after it had suffered a smoke-like dispersal.

When I had listened to Tommy Redcliffe reminiscing about the wild and drunken moments he had shared with my father at Oxford, I asked him to explain why a man who apparently enjoyed such times had bothered to make frequent train trips down to Hove in order to eat a wine-free dinner with someone as uncaptivating as Great Granny Webster.

Tommy Redcliffe had only met my great-grandmother once or twice, but she had remained forever imprinted on his memory. He disagreed with Aunt Lavinia's theory that my father's motives for visiting her had been mercenary. He felt Aunt Lavinia had always seen everything in life as a lottery and therefore assumed that everybody must see it as she did. In his opinion my father would have had to have been a fool to think that, however much he tried to ingratiate himself with Great Granny Webster, he could ever end up inheriting her fortune.

“One only had to take one look at that old woman's face to realise that someone as trenchantly ungenerous in life would have to be just as ungenerous in death. No one but an idiot could imagine that a woman with such an intensely punitive nature could ever allow another human being to get any profit from her demise.”

Then why was my father always going down to Hove to see her, I asked. If he had gone for the money it seemed a little corrupt, but his motives were at least intelligible.

“I think Ivor's reasons were probably quite complex. The joke may have been—that against all probabilities he secretly rather liked her.”

“What did he like about her?”

Tommy Redcliffe laughed, as if the very idea of anyone liking Great Granny Webster amused him. “I can't say that I think he liked her—at least not in the sense that he liked other people. Obviously he was much too ebullient and pleasure-loving to find a woman like that very entertaining. But I still think he liked the idea that, with a person such as old Mrs Webster, you can never get any surprises. Whenever he went down to see her, there she would be in exactly the same brave and despondent state she had been in when he last saw her.”

“But a lot of people wouldn't find that in the least appealing. A lot of people might find that deadly.” I myself didn't like it at all. I very much disliked the idea that although it was now three years since I had last seen her, Great Granny Webster was most probably still sitting in the same state of gloom on that same hard-backed chair.

“But your father did happen to like it. You must remember that he lived through a period where one had a sense that the whole of society was about to erupt like a pus-swollen boil. We still felt much too close to all the carnage and the mess of the First World War. In the 'twenties and the 'thirties everything seemed to be in a continual state of uncertainty and turmoil. And there was something about the way our group liked to destroy themselves with drink—the way we always felt that we had to try to whoop it up—that had some funny kind of violence. It's hard to describe it now, but it was as if we were infected with a horrible feeling of fatalistic foreboding—as if we knew that nothing could ever stop us sliding towards all the pointless bloody upheaval of yet another war ...”

Tommy Redcliffe seemed to sense that I was still puzzled as to how this explained my father's mysterious visits to Hove. He reached out with a nervous and automatic gesture and took a gulp of ginger-ale, as if he longed for his glass to contain something stronger. For a moment his voice had the embarrassed and overtactful tone that is often used in describing a dead parent to its child.