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

denied ...”
    Aunt Lavinia went over to her dressing-table, which was kidney-shaped and had skirts of mushroom velvet fringed with bobbles. Sitting down on a swivel stool, she picked up one of the silver-backed hairbrushes from Cartiers which had recently been given her by an admirer and on which her initials were engraved in large baroque letters. As she talked, she kept running the brush through her silky auburn hair, with a deliberate self-indulgent relish. Then, selecting a lipstick in a silver case that exactly matched the hairbrush, she examined herself with approval and carefully perfected the scarlet cupid’s bow line of her lips.
    â€œIt was absolutely typical,” she said. “Just when I was writhing in the abyss, a wreck of a woman with no make-up and dirty clotted hospital hair, that most hated figure of all, my chief jailer, the head psychiatrist, developed the most unwelcome and fatal crush on me. I really had quite a ghastly time with him, darling. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse moment. Incarcerated in that red-brick Victorian monstrosity of a hospital, I was hardly in the mood for love ...”
    Aunt Lavinia got up from her dressing-table and glided across her bedroom, her slim hips swaying in the provocative way she walked because she always wore such excessively high-heeled shoes. She found an ivory manicure set in one of her cupboards and came back to lie down and stretch herself comfortably on her large Hollywood bed with the gleaming white satin cover that exactly matched her carpets and looked both festive and bridal. She threw off her shoes, and I noticed how beautiful her feet were. As she went on talking, she started to give herself a manicure and took a piece of cotton wool dipped in pear-smelling varnish-remover and deftly began removing the scarlet enamel from her long and perfect nails.
    She said that when she had first been admitted to the hospital she had been put in the public ward. Dr Kronin, the chief psychiatrist, had come to see her, and stood by her bed looking through sheaves of notes. She had been in a dazed state, having just finished a crying spell. She had vaguely noticed that he was physically extremely unprepossessing, that he had a balding and sallow dome of a head, and moist selfish-looking lips, and that he was wearing thick bi-focal lenses through which gleamed a pair of sulphur-coloured eyes that resembled two tiny sultanas.
    She felt not the slightest wish to talk to him. He struck her as one of those dapper little ugly doctors who carry unnecessarily large black bags and bristle with self-importance and insensitivity.
    â€œHow do you like it here?” he asked her.
    She thought the question idiotic but made some grunting answer.
    Dr Kronin said he had the feeling that she would make a quicker recovery if she was moved to a private room.
    â€œI felt quite grateful to the wretched little man.” Aunt Lavinia started putting fresh scarlet varnish on one of her fingernails, taking care to leave a white and even moon. “I really felt quite grateful. That is the irony.”
    She had been extremely anxious to move, because she felt a desperate need to have a private telephone. “You know me, darling. If you cut me off from a telephone, it’s like cutting me off from oxygen.”
    Dr Kronin had asked her if she could afford to be a private patient. She found this insulting and impertinent. “I’ve never enjoyed being regarded as a pauper, particularly on the occasions when I am perilously near to being one. So, despite my weakened condition, I stared at Dr Kronin with what I hoped was a quelling and haughty gaze, and I assured him that money was no object. And all the time I was frantically wondering which of my beaux I dared ask to fork out and cover my expenses ...”
    Dr Kronin had said he would arrange for her to be moved as soon as possible.
    â€œIt still never occurred to me that he had the diabolical plan of