Great Granny Webster (9 page)

“Ivor was very witty and popular. He had a laconic façade. But underneath all that I never felt he was a very happy man. Like most of us, he drank much too much. He had many personal problems. He was a man in no way fitted for military life—basically he was a scholar. When the Second War finally broke out I always thought he joined that regiment much too quickly. It was as if he felt he hadn't fulfilled his early Oxford promise—that his whole life had reached such an emotional impasse that he rushed into the army as if he saw it as a solution ...”

Tommy Redcliffe shifted uneasily in the chair of the restaurant where we were sitting, and I became acutely conscious of the protruding rigidity of his artificial leg.

“You shouldn't forget,” he said, “that when your father came back on leave from jungle-fighting in Burma, he must have found London, with all the nightly German bombardments, a very crazed and nerve-torn city. As I remember it then, everyone drank like fishes. I think I can understand why he may have been quite glad to get out of it all for a moment—quietly to get on a train which would take him down to your Great Granny Webster who would be sitting there in Hove astringently drinking her glasses of water—as unchanged by the new war as she was unchanged by everything else ...”

“What do you think they both talked about when he went down to visit her?” I wondered whether Great Granny Webster could possibly have been more interesting than I had ever imagined—whether I had been too young when I stayed with her to appreciate her more subtle qualities. All at once I remembered my own inexplicable feeling of panic at Brighton station when I realised I was leaving her for ever. Everything was orderly and predictable in the fusty sealed-off universe that she inhabited. Like her dark furniture, she seemed built to last. She gave no sign that she had ever felt there was any reason to question what she was—or what she stood for. Despite the humiliations of extreme old age, her sense of the worth of her own identity was solid because it had become inseparable from the hallowed stability of her own unvarying routines. Only when one was losing Great Granny Webster and was moving off into a more modern arena peopled by uncertain, bruised identities, confused by ever-shifting, contradictory values, could one start to regret the reliability of her single-minded self-containedness. Even if one happened to dislike both her ways and her values, because she saw herself as too highly placed and well-armoured to need to care about vulgar criticism she remained in a sense the winner. Never having wished to receive pleasure, or give it, she forced one to admit that there was something admirably robust in the way she was totally devoid of any newfangled and slavish desire to please.

Tommy Redcliffe thought it unlikely that my father and Great Granny Webster had talked all that much when he had travelled down to visit her. “Talk has never been that old woman's strong point, and if he wanted sparkling conversation Ivor would hardly have been such a lunatic as to look for it in Hove. What she could give him was the feeling that he knew exactly what to expect from her. Many people might not value the sensation particularly. But I don't think it was something your father had felt very much in his life and it was a feeling he badly needed. Underneath all his apparent assurance, I don't think he ever quite knew what to expect from anyone. You must remember that your grandmother Dunmartin was a very different person from Great Granny Webster. From his earliest childhood your father had always lived in secret terror, never knowing what his mother was going to do or say.”

I asked Tommy Redcliffe if he had known my grandmother Dunmartin. Child of Great Granny Webster, mother of my father and Aunt Lavinia, this faceless woman who had attacked my infant brother at his formal christening still remained a menacing blank in my imagination.

Tommy Redcliffe had often gone over to Ulster to shoot at Dunmartin Hall while he was an undergraduate, and had got to know her then. He always found her very frightening, long before she was officially considered insane. He described her as a woman who seemed to have no centre. She went tossing through life like a leaf blown by every wind of her caprice. If you found her laughing you couldn't tell what amused her; if you saw her crying you couldn't quite tell what distressed her. None of her reactions seemed to be determined by external events. At that time he had also felt quite sorry for her—a pretty Englishwoman who had lost her youth living in a rainy province in an immense grey isolated house that was so cold you had to put on an overcoat to walk through its halls.

Tommy Redcliffe had enjoyed the pheasant-shooting at Dunmartin Hall, but otherwise he did not have very enthusiastic memories of the house where I had lived until my father was killed. Whereas I remembered Dunmartin Hall with affection and nostalgia, he had not seen anything especially attractive in the fact that its smells of damp-infested libraries had mingled with those of cow-dung, potato cakes and paraffin.

He had found the house architecturally very displeasing with its vast and sprawling ivy-coated wings, which at certain periods had been added to, at others pulled down at immense cost in the interests of economy and manageability. He had been depressed by the way it seemed like a gigantic monument to more prosperous and eternally lost times, dominating the countryside in its stately dilapidation.

Although he could admit that its tall and formal windows had very beautiful views—of gorse-dotted mountain, slate-grey lake and copses of copper beech—he had not felt that they compensated for Dunmartin Hall's many discomforts. He hated the way the food at meals was always stone-cold because it had to be carried by the butler from a dungeon kitchen which was in a different wing from the dining-room. Dunmartin Hall had something wrong with its plumbing, and he had been astonished that in a house of such pretension there was very rarely hot water and it was considered a luxury if anyone managed to get a peat-brown trickle of a bath.

Tommy Redcliffe suffered from rheumatism and he was convinced that the first fatal seeds of it had been sown when he stayed in that Northern Irish house before the war and his sheets were invariably wringing wet. Years later his voice still trembled with astonished complaint as he remembered nights when there had always seemed to be a bat trapped in his bedroom, nights when the cold had been such that he often found it easier to get to sleep lying fully clothed on the floor-boards under a couple of dusty carpets than in his unaired bed.

When he tried to describe my unknown grandmother, his whole description of her was coloured by sympathy for what he felt she must have suffered when her marriage doomed her to spend years and years of her life in the stultifying isolation and relentless biting damp of that ancestral Ulster house.

I had gathered from Cousin Kathleen that my grandmother had never loved my grandfather. She had married him only because Great Granny Webster wished her to. As a Scotswoman, that determined old lady had liked the idea of her daughter marrying a man of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Apparently she distrusted marriages with Englishmen, seeing them as unreliable—a prejudice that may have come from personal experience, for her own husband had been English. William Webster was a figure who was never to be retrieved from the past. All I ever learnt of him was that he had died of heart failure a year after he married her. He was very rich, and the money he left Great Granny Webster long outlasted his legend.

When my grandmother was seventeen Great Granny Webster had decided it would be correct to bring her daughter “out” in London. Although that critical old lady had always loathed England and everything that she saw as Englishness, her shrewder side convinced her that London as a centre might be a sounder place than Edinburgh in which to invest the money that was necessary to give her daughter a “season.”

Unlike her morose-faced mother, as a girl my grandmother had been very pretty, with bright gold curls and an impish expression. For three summer months Great Granny Webster had escorted her daughter to London balls. She sat on gilded cane-backed chairs by the walls of innumerable dance-floors wearing such a martyred yet indomitable expression on her face that everyone felt she must be the physical reincarnation of some lone survivor of the massacre of Killiecrankie.

Much more upright than any other chaperoning mother, Great Granny Webster had not been at all popular in the London society of that period, and it was only by dint of her notorious wealth that she managed to get an entrée to its fashionable festivities. She was never invited to any house parties or shoots in the country, and as a result my grandmother was never invited either. It was considered that Great Granny Webster would be far too great a social trial to her neighbours at mealtimes. But she succeeded in getting her-self and her daughter invited to London balls, where it was felt that in all the commotion and whirl of these crowded, gay events the scorch of her silent reproof could do no one very much harm.

Most of the other chaperoning mothers enjoyed the London balls of the season. They wore sensational dresses that showed off the beauty of their waists and shoulders, and their jewellery sparkled in the light of the chandeliers as they whispered scandal together and waltzed and flirted with the young men who were prospective husbands for their daughters.

Great Granny Webster always made it plain to everyone that she had not come to these balls to enjoy herself. A striking figure in an ink-black dress, wearing elbow-high dark gloves that were tightly fastened with ebony buttons, she formally greeted her hostess on arrival and after that she mixed with no one. She found herself a gold chair by the side of the wall and through the long night hours, with all the restraint and tragic resignation suitable to someone attending a death bed, she listened to the music and watched my grandmother dance.

Great Granny Webster always claimed she was a fighter, but, intrepid battler that she was, on the stroke of midnight her endurance would give out. She was not a woman who was prepared to over-do her duty. By twelve o'clock she felt she need endure the ball no longer. Her carriage would be sent for and, like Cinderella, my grandmother would be taken home.

My grandfather Dunmartin apparently fell in love with my grandmother in the months she was doing her London season. When he proposed to her, Great Granny Webster was, in the grimness of her fashion, gratified. She felt that all the pains she had endured sitting out so many balls were now rewarded. She approved of the fact that my grandfather was an Ulsterman, because of his blood-link with Scotland. She approved of the fact that he owned an inherited estate and was the son of a former Governor General of Canada. Inasmuch as she could be pleased, the idea of this marriage pleased her. It would spare her the torment of chaperoning my grandmother through another London season. She was intensely keen that her daughter should marry young. In 1894 Great Granny Webster was already pining to leave London and start her retirement, that tenacious retirement which was to astonish everyone by its protractedness and carry her unscathed through two major world wars, to the period when I was to meet her with Richards, in Hove.

My grandfather Dunmartin had died when I was still very young, a few months after my grandmother was committed for life to a mental institution, and I remembered nothing about him. When Tommy Redcliffe had gone over to stay at Dunmartin Hall, he had seen my grandfather as a kindly, but nervously ineffectual, man, whose intense anxiety obscured his florid features to a point that he seemed masked—one saw his worry before becoming conscious of his pleasant porcine face. My grandmother's irrational behaviour had made him wretched. He was baffled as to why his wife was no longer the charming sprite-like little girl whom he had married and brought to live at Dunmartin Hall. He was terrified by her inexplicable changes of mood, her odd and obsessive preoccupations, her outbursts of hysterical hostility.

He always treated her with excessive gallantry, jumping to his feet whenever she entered a room. She liked to waft noiselessly in and out of doors. Her entrances and her exits were always intensely sudden and dramatic, and it was impossible to tell what prompted her to make them. Her husband, however, always seemed thrilled when she made one of her mysterious and fleeting appearances. He kept hoping that if she were shown enough courtesy and admiration she might be again as she had been when he had married her. He kissed her limp white hand and rushed to find her a comfortable chair. He adjusted the shawl round her shoulders to protect her from the cold; begged her to have a cup of tea, a glass of wine. He always called her “my beautiful spouse.” When other people thought her peculiar, he suffered for her and tried to make excuses. “She has had this terrible back-ache, sinus trouble, fever ...” Some of my grandmother's remarks could seem so eccentric as to be alarming, but he always tried to present them as beguiling. “You realise that my beautiful spouse was only trying to pull your leg. She's a fearful little tease ...” In his fussy and devoted way he was always trying to think up small things that might please her. He would go off into the woods at Dunmartin to pick her bunches of wild flowers. He bought her boxes of chocolates from the sweet shop in the local village. “Just a little surprise for my lovely queen ...”

When my grandfather Dunmartin was not brooding on his wife's unstable state of mind, he worried incessantly about his farm, which he ran with an amateurish ineptitude that resulted in an immense and automatic annual loss. Great Granny Webster had not chosen to give her daughter one single penny. Having got her suitably married, the old lady felt that my grandmother's financial situation was entirely the affair of her husband. Day and night my grandfather kept worrying about his ever-dwindling finances, for he had inherited Dunmartin Hall without inheriting a fraction of the money that was required to run it and he was tortured by his inability to maintain this grandiose and unwieldy establishment in the style to which he had been brought up to feel it demanded. He was terrified by the crippling inherited debts of his vast yet mouldering estate, with its unmendable walls and fences, its forlornly empty stables, non-laying chickens, appleless orchards, its cows that had no yield. He felt like a criminal as he watched his beautiful ornamental trees being cut down to be sold as firewood. Thistle and gorse were ruining his grazing land. Every month more of his unprofitable acres had to be sold.