Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood Read Free Book Online Page A

On her piano, on every tiny mock-Regency card-table, were cluttered photographs of Aunt Lavinia, of her poodle Poo Poo, of her various lost husbands and lovers. It was as if she needed a great deal of visual evidence to be able to feel that any of these posed figures had much validity.
    When I went up to her bedroom on the day she came out of hospital I dreaded opening the door, for I had a horror of finding her beautiful white carpets trailed with spots of blood. I was haunted by an image of Aunt Lavinia lying in scarlet water in her luxurious bathroom, which she had fitted out with white enamelled tiles adorned with golden dragons—that bathroom which had more glass shelves than I had ever seen, covered with her collection of glass fishes containing pine and wild-rose and lily-of-the-valley bath essence.
    If there had been any traces of her recent gruesome incident, she had completely eradicated them with the same ease and speed with which she seemed to be able to blot out all unpleasant experience. There she was, looking very young. Her bedroom was filled with great vases of wonderful scented white lilies, which she had already found the time to send to herself from some local florist.
    As usual, she was immaculately dressed with what she always called “flair.” She was wearing all the gay little kerchiefs, the gleaming unexpected buttons, the subtly placed flash of valuable jewellery, by which she managed to make the drabbest clothes she wore seem unique, and amazing. Her oddly-shaped face, which generally looked beautiful, and only sometimes reminded one too much of an over-intense and bright-eyed monkey, had been very carefully made up. Clearly she had left “prison” and gone immediately to an early-morning appointment with her hairdresser.
    She said she felt in “excellent form.” She seemed just as she had always seemed to me—affectionate, flippant and disquietingly unreal. She appeared to be very relaxed, chatting about this and that in confidential and husky tones. She told me that she was dying to go racing at Newmarket this year—that she had been before and always found it divine. She felt no need to give me any reasons why she had just tried to kill herself. All her relationships had invariably been superficial, and maybe she felt so superficially rooted to life that it seemed hardly very momentous to her whether she stayed in it or left it. She gave me the sense that she felt it would only bore me if she went into explanations—that she thought she would be stating the obvious. She had a horror of being dull.
    Aunt Lavinia had always told me that I was by far her favourite relation. I discovered later that she had told my brother exactly the same thing. Her flattery wasn’t entirely self-indulgent, it stemmed from such a strong desire to make everyone’s dealings with her uniquely pleasant. Whatever she really felt about me, she liked to ring me up from time to time to tell me about her latest “adventure.” This might be a new love affair, a discovery of some new way of making raspberry ice-cream or some unlikely vicissitude that had befallen her while she was taking Poo Poo to the vet.
    Now it was only the “adventurous” side of her bungled suicide that she wished to discuss with me, the horrors of her treatment in the hospital.
    â€œAt the time I never told you the worst thing that happened to me, darling. Certain experiences can be so distasteful that one can only bear to discuss them later when they have been to some degree digested ...”
    Dr Kronin, the head psychiatrist, had become infatuated with her. “To understand, darling, why I found this so insufferable you have to picture my unenviable predicament—my frame of mind. You have to visualise me chained to my narrow bed. A prisoner of the state. A person regarded by all and sundry as a non-person. A creature considered to be of unsound mind. All my most basic human rights