Free Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood Page A

that this thing she found so terrible was spreading all around her.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œOld 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.
    â€œYour father used to say