Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood Read Free Book Online

remember any more ... But the real nightmare is that now I’ve ended up confined in this dreadful place like a convict. All the nurses are the most horrible old bitches. The doctor here says that I must have fainted. It’s all too disgusting—if you faint, apparently all the blood in your veins automatically congeals. How on earth was one meant to know that fainting could be so fatal?”
    This soliloquy, which Aunt Lavinia delivered in exactly the same breathlessly mannered and laughing way that she told amusing anecdotes at her cocktail parties, I found horrifying. She kept repeating that it was “infuriating” that she had failed in her attempt, but she gave me no feeling that she was asking for any sympathy for the ugly and despairing state of mind that must have preceded her decision to take her life. She merely appeared to be demanding the social sympathy one might extend to someone who had been planning a much-longed-for trip to the Greek Islands, only to be thwarted by some tiresome technicality which had necessitated that the holiday be cancelled.
    Obviously she wanted to present her near-suicide as farce rather than tragedy. She appeared to see death rather as she saw life, as an exciting but unimportant game. She seemed untouched by her recent experience. Just as Great Granny Webster always behaved as if she felt it would be demeaning and unladylike to be pleased by anything, so Aunt Lavinia always behaved as if there was something degrading in admitting to any feelings of distress. On the telephone she kept assuring me that she had never felt better in her life—there was only one thing that was upsetting and angering her: the hospital had confiscated her brush and her comb.
    â€œThey won’t allow me any objects. They don’t trust me. It’s all too stupid. I’d really love someone to tell me how one would begin to commit suicide with a comb. Would one eat it? But I feel in despair, darling. I can’t tell you the fright I look ...”
    I asked her if she would like me to visit her, but she said she couldn’t bear me to see her looking such a dishevelled mess.
    â€œIf they want to drive a person like me to her death they couldn’t be setting about it more successfully. How can one be expected to regain one’s wish to live when the brutes make it impossible for one to have a lipstick or do one’s hair?”
    I went round to see her in her Mayfair house the same morning that she was released from hospital.
    Her house combined ostentatiousness and vulgarity with every kind of comfort. In its centre was a small ballroom with a polished parquet floor and a raised dais for the band. This was where she gave her parties. In her drawing-room there was a huge gleaming chromium-plated bar. All the shelves behind it were stacked with rows and rows of bottles of rare wine, a vast amount of spirits and various exotic liqueurs. She had managed to make this great display of alcohol seem like a splendid and memorable decoration. Her bar, with its rich contrasting colours, dominated the room like an impressive, jewel-studded altar.
    Aunt Lavinia loved to sit in front of her bar on a high chromium stool with a seat made of green velvet. She would cross her legs and pull up her skirts to show their beauty and stay there late into the night, laughing with friends, to whom she dispensed drinks with the efficiency of an able, talkative bar-maid.
    Most of the floors in her house had been laid with white wall-to-wall carpeting, so thick and bouncy it gave you the sense of being on a trampoline. One felt uneasy walking on so much whiteness. Her carpets created a fear that one might soil them with a footprint, as though one were walking through some large expanse of virgin snow.
    Aunt Lavinia’s walls were covered with a mixture of elaborate mirrors and fashionable portraits in oil. All the portraits were of herself, and they mostly represented her wearing period costume.